Amazon says government demands for user data spiked by 800% in 2020
New transparency figures released by Amazon show the company responded to a record number of government data demands in the last six months of 2020.
The new figures land in the company's bi-annual transparency report published to Amazon's website over the weekend.
Amazon said it processed 27,664 government demands for user data in the last six months of 2020, up from 3,222 data demands in the first six months of the year, an increase of close to 800%. That user data includes shopping searches and data from its Echo, Fire, and Ring devices.
The new report presents the data differently from previous transparency disclosures. Amazon now breaks down the top requesting countries. U.S. authorities historically made up the bulk of the overall data demands Amazon receives, but this latest report shows Germany with 42% of all requests, followed by Spain with 18%, and Italy and the U.S. with 11% share each.
But the report also removes the breakdown by legal process, and now only differentiates between the requests it gets for user's content and for non-content. Amazon said it handed over user content data in 52 cases.
For its Amazon Web Services cloud business, which it reports separately, Amazon said it processed 523 data demands, with 75% of all requests made by U.S. authorities, and Amazon turned over user's content in 15 cases.
An Amazon spokesperson would not say what led to the sharp rise in data demands. (Amazon seldom comments on its transparency reports.)
Amazon's transparency report is one of the lightest reads of all the tech giants at just three pages in length, and spends most of the report explaining how it responds to each legal demand than on the data itself. The company, known for its notorious secrecy, became the last of the major tech giants to push out a transparency report in 2015. Where most tech companies added data to their transparency reports, like takedown notices and account removals, Amazon bucked the trend by removing data from its reports, despite the company's growing reach into millions of homes.
The Financial Times reported this weekend that Ring, the video doorbell and home security startup acquired by Amazon for $1 billion, now has 2,000 law enforcement partners across the United States, allowing police departments to access homeowners' doorbell camera footage.
Amazon's Ring Neighbors app exposed users' precise locations and home addresses