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This article is more than 1 year old

Reddit: Don't worry, we didn't tell that foreign government about your /r/brony addiction

Uncle Sam on the other hand ... Data demands by feds revealed

4chan-with-karma-points Reddit has published its first dossier on government demands for users' private records – and the stupidly popular messageboard says it handed over the goods 32 times last year.

According to the website's transparency report for 2014, world governments asked for Redditors' details just 55 times, peanuts compared to the tens of thousands of requests sites like Facebook and Google get every year.

Reddit attracted about 170 million unique visitors, and served about 6 billion pages, in a month at its peak in 2014, we're told. Facebook is about ten times bigger, in terms of monthly users.

Here's Reddit's table of stats for last year:

Category Requests User accounts named in requests Requests with legally binding gag orders Requests where some info was disclosed Requests where some user info was disclosed
US subpoenas 29 30 6 17 59%
US search warrants 8 12 7 7 88%
International requests 5 5 n/a 0 0%
US emergency requests 7 7 n/a 4 57%
US civil subpoenas 6 24 0 4 67%
Total 55 78 13 32 58%

Of those 55 requests for account records last year, Reddit yielded at least some data 32 times, a success rate of 58 per cent for the g-men. 78 users were specifically named in the requests, and 13 of the demands had legally binding gag orders preventing Reddit from warning those being potentially surveilled.

The social network said it rejected all five requests for five specific users it received from non-American governments; the rest of the demands came from Uncle Sam's finest or US civil suits.

US subpoenas were the most common form of demanding user info: 35 criminal and civil subpoena requests were received, 21 resulting in at least some records being handed over. US search warrants were the most effective, relatively speaking, yielding information seven out of eight times.

Takedown requests for stuff on the site were sent to Reddit 218 times. 176 of those demands were related to copyright infringement and resulted in Reddit wiping stuff from its pages 66 times. Trademark infringement takedown requests were issued nine times but were only successful twice.

The "other" category, which includes claims of defamation, was responsible for 33 requests, though Reddit said it declined all of those requests. ®

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