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The government is requesting data from Facebook at a particularly high rate in the first half of 2015, according to a report released by the social networking giant on Wednesday.

Governments have turned to using the voluntary social media accounts of citizens, who willingly post an amalgam of personal information, in order to create vast databases of citizen activity. Pushing back, the technology companies have sought greater transparency on government data requests, so as to alleviate fears that they are working with governments.

Facebook released their biannual Global Government Requests Report, indicating the number of times a government has requested information on users as well as requests for certain content to be blocked.

Such requests are generally not allowed to be published.

The report covers 93 countries’ requests between January and June 2015.

The US is shown to be the country most interested in user data, with 26,579 requests during this time period. Facebook says it provided 17,577 of the total requested.

India’s requests topped out at 6,268 and the UK’s at 4,489.

India is shown to block the most content within its country for violating local law, with 15,155 restricted posts, whereas Turkey blocked 4,496 posts. Reuters reports that India’s number of Facebook users jumped nearly 70 million since June 2014 to over 190 million users.

Facebook said on its website that requests for data by governments so far in 2015 rose 18%, from 35,051 in the second half of 2014 to 41,214 this year.

"Facebook does not provide any government with 'back doors' or direct access to people's data," the tech giant wrote.

Users have become more cognizant of the revolving door between governments and tech companies since Edward Snowden leaked a series of National Security Agency documents in 2013 revealing a global surveillance program, much of which was taking place without regard for US and international laws.

According to the leaked documents, the NSA would build a “pattern of life” for a wide swath or “dragnet” of the population, essentially meaning a compilation of cellphone, laptop, Skype, chat-room and Facebook communications without the user’s knowledge.

The NSA used Facebook profiles to gauge friends of users three degrees of separation away, in order to justify broad sweeps of data collection. According to the Guardian, the agency is allowed to travel three degrees from a suspect, meaning if a friend of a friend of a friend on Facebook is suspected of wrongdoing, the government can legally monitor your data.

Facebook and the other tech giants like Microsoft and Google have taken a lukewarm role in the way they deal with government data collection, but it is certain that the privacies of internet users and social media have been and will continue to be violated.