Law enforcement agencies have gotten fairly addicted to requesting data from tech companies over the past decade. Using information from tech companies has become one of cops’ favorite investigative techniques the world over.
Surfshark, a prominent VPN provider, recently put together a report that shows which countries’ governments request the most data from several of the tech industry’s biggest firms—specifically, Google, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft. When it comes to which countries come out on top, Surfshark isn’t categorizing “biggest” data-sharers according to which governments made the most requests—otherwise the winner would obviously be China. Also, Google and Meta largely don’t operate in China. Instead, its metrics are based on the number of accounts that governments requested data on relative to the nation’s overall population. Thus, the countries that are listed as the biggest data-requesters are the ones that have requested the most data per 100,000 people. Here’s what the report’s findings reveal.
