Apple, Adobe, Dropbox and Yahoo are among the tech companies that are rated highest in the Electronic Frontier Foundation s latest Who Has Your Back Report. The report, now in its fifth year, examines tech companies handling of government requests for user data.
The companies mentioned above each earned five stars out of five. WhatsApp and AT&T each got one star.
The EFF, a non-profit digital-rights group based in San Francisco, rated the companies based on five criteria: follows industry-accepted best practices; tells users about government data demands; discloses data-retention policies; discloses government content-removal requests; and, in this year s EFF-chosen pro-user policy, opposes backdoors, or direct government access to user information.
By follows industry-accepted best practices, the EFF means that the company: requires a warrant before handing over data; publishes a transparency report about number of government requests and how it responded to them; and publishes a law-enforcement guide to explain how it responds to those requests.
The EFF said that its criteria has evolved over the years, getting tougher this year as previous best practices have become industry standards. For example, especially in the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks, more companies have published transparency reports.
Now, users should expect companies to far exceed the standards articulated in the original Who Has Your Back report, the EFF said. Users should look to companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon to be transparent about the types of content that is blocked or censored in response to government requests, as well as what deleted data is kept around in case government agents seek it in the future. We also look to these companies to take a principled stance against government-mandated backdoors.
Google earned three stars. It failed to get a star for informing users about government data demands. The EFF said that while the company promises to inform users about government requests and before it turns the data over, it does not commit to providing notice after an emergency has ended or a gag has been lifted. Google also did not get a star for disclosing its data-retention policies because the EFF said the company does not provide complete information about the information it retains.
Facebook earned four stars. It did not get a star for disclosing government content-removal requests. WhatsApp, the messaging app Facebook now owns, is included in the EFF report for the first time and earned only one star, for its parent company s opposition to backdoors.
Twitter earned four stars, failing to get a star for informing users about government data demands. The EFF said that like Google, Twitter does not provide notice after an emergency has ended or a gag has been lifted.
Also earning five stars were Credo Mobile, Sonic.net, Wikimedia and WordPress.
The ratings are below. The full report is on EFF s website. And here s our coverage of last year s report.
Illustration at top from KRT archives
