Amazon says governments requested record amount of user data last year
The requests came from all over the globe.
Customer data is in high demand.
Amazon released a new transparency report Sunday, disclosing how much user data law enforcement agencies requested in the last half of 2020. The info ranged from what some people searched for to what was said to Alexa speakers, as noted earlier by TechCrunch.
The biannual Amazon Information Request Report shows an 800% increase in user data requests by governments from July 1 to Dec. 31. In total, the company processed 27,664 demands from the US and foreign government agencies. These requests were legal orders including subpoenas, search warrants and court actions.
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The country with the most requests was Germany with 42%, followed by Spain with 18%, while the US and Italy each had 11% of the requests.
Amazon also processed requests for its Amazon Web Services. The report shows 523 information requests were made. The US made up almost 75% of the requests.
Most of the data provided by Amazon was what it calls "non-content" information. This includes name, address, billing information, retail purchase history and AWS usages. Only 52 requests were "content" information, such as customer's photos or, in the case of AWS, what customers transferred, processed or stored with the services.
See more: Homeland Security watchdog to examine agency's use of phone location data