Dropbox received 268 requests for user information from law enforcement agencies in the first half of 2014, the company has revealed in its updated transparency report.
The company also disclosed that it received 37 requests for information from outside the United States, explaining that “at this time, we require non-US governments to follow the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty process or letters rogatory process so that a US court will issue the required US legal process to Dropbox”.
In 2013, the company required 90 requests from outside the US over the whole year.
Published biannually for the first time, the report also shares information on how many national security requests Dropbox has received from the US government.
But, in keeping with other firms, Dropbox has only been allowed to disclose the existence of these letters in an nonspecific aggregation: the most information it can share is that it received “0-249” letters, which affected “0-249” accounts.
“While that number is small compared to our 300 million users,” says Bart Volkmer, Dropbox’s legal counsel, “we treat all the requests we receive seriously and scrutinize them to make sure they satisfy legal requirements before complying. We also push back in cases where agencies are seeking too much information or haven’t followed the proper procedures.”
Those requests translated into the company handing over content 103 times, and “non-content” – which drop-box defines as “subscriber information such as the name and email address associated with the account; the date of account creation and other transactional information like IP addresses” – was handed over a further 80 times.
The company also emphasised its commitment to notifying users of any governmental request for their data. “Government agencies keep asking us not to notify users of requests for their data, even when they are not legally entitled to do so,” the company says. “If we receive a request that comes with a gag order, we’ll inform requesting agency of our policy and let users know about the request unless the agency provides a valid court order (or an equivalent).”
The transparency report is in its third year, but it hasn’t prevented attacks from advocates such as Edward Snowden, who called the company “hostile to privacy”. “Dropbox is a targeted you know wannabe PRISM partner,” he told the Guardian in July 2014. “They just put … Condoleezza Rice on their board … who is probably the most anti-privacy official you can imagine.”
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