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Comment by rasterizer | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it illegal to disclose these?

Yes.

However, it's grossly misleading to release aggregate statistics without even a mention of the fact that, should other avenues of requesting and/or retrieving data exist, that those are not included in the totals.

It's shady as fuck.

Are you suggesting that they shouldn't have a transparency report at all unless everything is on the table? I disagree. They aren't even allowed to mention FISA so they don't, and they don't have to disclose anything.

Edit: also as someone already commented here: they do mention that the data is 'not comprehensive'.

I'm not sure if I can assuage your anger, but the Transparency Report is upfront that there are reasons not all requests for user data are disclosed. The data isn't purported to be comprehensive, though we'd like it to be as comprehensive as possible.

http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/userdatarequests/fa... http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/userdatarequests/le...

This is exactly the reasoning I've heard from people at Facebook in the past week for why they don't release a transparency report. They said that any report they'd release would be complete bullshit because of these FISA requests.

If they didn't receive any, I assume they can disclose that. I'm really not sure what this means, to be honest. Was anyone speculating that Google never received a FISA request of some sort? Does anyone know how common it is to send out such request to a company?

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