AT&T and Verizon received one government data request per minute last year

However, companies have now altered their privacy policies

We recently heard about some companies including Apple, Facebook and Google planning to disclose government data requests to the customers and the government certainly was not happy about this, stating that this could actually go in favor of some criminals. Following this, these companies started updating their privacy policies but so far we have got no information on whether AT&T and Verizon plan to do the same or not.

The Washington Post however has been quite interested and they have pored through the companies’ transparency reports to turn up a new stat which shows that in 2013 AT&T and Verizon received more than one request every 60 seconds. This comes from reliable sources of the companies’ own reporting of 301,816 requests for AT&T and Verizon’s 321,545 requests from state, local and federal authorities. These stats might seem to be overwhelming including the idea of having a request every one minute but this is nothing as compared to the Canadian telecom companies which have reportedly been receiving requests every 27 seconds.

For now, T-Mobile and Sprint seem to be out of this statistical result because these two companies didn’t opt to disclose any data to the customers for 2013. However, if the data from 2012 in considered then requests made to the top four US carriers average about 2.2 per minute.

source: washingtonpost