After Snowden’s disclosures more and more Internet and Telecom companies have started to release Transparency Reports. These reports reveal the amount of requests for users’ data they have (legally) received from the governments of different countries.

In theory, this is all very transparent. But in practice, the information from the reports is hard to process. There is no standard way the data is presented, making it hard to compare reports from different companies. To solve this, we created the Transparency Reports Database. Now researchers and journalists can access the data from every published Transparency Report, in a uniform and standardized format.

Google’s Standard

Google was the first company to publish a Transparency Report, with data on 2009. It contained information about the number of requests each individual country had filed to Google. Google now publishes a new report every six months, and adds information like the number of requests it complied with and the number of users’ accounts affected by each country’s legal inquiries. Recently Google started to specify the nature of the requests from the US government, and publishes the number of National Security Letters (albeit in broad ranges).

Google allows anyone to either view its Transparency Reports on a web page - with graphs and tables to summarize the main patterns - or to download them as a .CSV file.

By being the first to do this, Google unofficially created general guidelines that other companies have followed in publishing this kind of information. This is a step in the good direction, but there is still no real standard. Here are some examples.

Endless Variations

1. On the number of requests received:

When Twitter has received less than ten requests from a country, it uses the value “