Government request of Big tech account data

A study from Surfshark (from 2013 to 2021) shared in an article by Cointelegraph reveals that requests for personal user data from global governments increased by 25% in 2021; 732 773 Google accounts and 716 108 Meta (Facebook) accounts. 60% of the requests came from the United States and Europe. US requests were more than twice as many as Europe. Outside of US; Germany, Singapore, the United Kingdom and France were the main collectors of this data.

Leaked documents showed that the CIA had owned and operated Crypto AG, a Swiss encryption company. Crypto AG had clients from around the world ranging from the Vatican to Iran, including governments officials and private corporations. The hardware allowed the CIA to access the communications via backdoored hardware. Crypto AG was acquired with a partnership between West Germany and the CIA in 1970 and the CIA continued as sole owner until 2018.

Leaked documents from the Snowden revelations uncover the NSA Prism program that was used to spy on users of services including Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Youtube, Apple and many others. The NSA had direct access to the companies' servers. The data that was collected included email, chat (video & voice), photos, VoIP, file transfers, video conferencing, notifications of target activity (logins, etc.), online social networking details, and special requests.