[lapcat]

> The article seems to imply that the big social media companies should selectively comply with a valid warrant

They already selectively comply: "According to internal statistics provided by Meta, the company complies with government requests for user data more than 70% of the time".

[madeofpalk]

Purely opinion, but I'm sure a non-trivial amount of government requests for user data are invalid, warrantless, or unfulfillable (contains incorrect information).

> As we have said in prior reports, we always scrutinize every government request we receive to make sure it is legally valid, no matter which government makes the request. We comply with government requests for user information only where we have a good-faith belief that the law requires us to do so.

(But) they seem to apply legal discretion on which to follow, which is mostly expected. When Meta receives a request/warrant they must use their judgement to determine whether it's legal or not.

[lioeters]

> only where we have a good-faith belief that the law requires us

Given their track record, it's frightening that we're depending on the "good-faith belief" of Meta/Facebook and Alphabet/Google to make such legal decisions that affect people's lives.

But I suppose the alternative could be even worse, where they comply with any and all government requests for data, regardless of legal validity and requirement.

[smoldesu]

You might be surprised, 70% compliance is fairly low. For comparison, Apple complies with ~90%: https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/us.html

[madsmith]

And the other 30% is unknown so we can’t say they selectively comply. It’s quite possible the other 30% are invalid warrants, in which case there’s nothing to comply with.

[lapcat]

Social media companies can't decide that a warrant is "invalid". Only a court can decide that.

From the article:

> Goldman indicated examples where internet services affirmatively go to court to protect user interest, "but those are the exceptions." "There's thousands of requests for every one of those cases"

[Shish2k]

> Social media companies can't decide that a warrant is "invalid". Only a court can decide that.

They can, however, decide “this is worth pushing back against” vs “this is not worth pushing back against” - that 30% represents the number of times that Meta’s lawyers believed it was worth pushing back and they were proved correct

[joenot443]

I’m sure you’re aware, but there’s pretty obviously a huge difference between the police requesting info because they want to make an arrest and any other government branch asking Meta for data on anything else. My guess is Meta’s cooperation rate with police would be much higher than 70%.

[ThinkBeat]

Well 100% is more than 70%. So we can if we want to assume that means 100%

A much more informative statement would be:

"We turn down about 25% of all requests"

[misnome]

That says nothing about warrants.