That Reuters “data requests” graph, handled properly

Created 14 June 2013 by Zoe O'Connell

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In the last few days, Reuters have produced a graph titled “Top 10 countries requesting for user data from tech companies“. It’s been circulated widely, having been picked up by Techspot, ISPreview, Gizmodo, io9 and others.

It is also very misleading because it reports the absolute number of requests, ignoring the relative size of the countries concerned. I have covered this before with Google’s transparency report, analyzing the data based on the population of the countries concerned. The Reuters graph goes beyond the Google data and includes the more recent Twitter and Microsoft/Skype transparency reports. So, I have repeated the same exercise and duplicated their graph with more representative numbers:

User data requests 2012

For comparison, here is the Reuters graph. (Click for a larger version) Reuters-data-requests

There’s quite a difference – the US drops to number 10. Arguably, you could say that Luxembourg and Malta are unreliable data points due to their relatively small size, but that still puts the US at number eight. The raw data is reproduced below.

Rank Country Population Google Microsoft Skype Twitter Total Requests per million people
1 Luxembourg 537,000 0 55 98 0 153 284.9
2 Taiwan 23,174,528 561 4,381 316 0 5,258 226.9
3 United Kingdom 62,008,049 2,883 9,226 1268 36 13,413 216.3
4 Malta 416,055 0 75 5 0 80 192.3
5 France 65,447,374 3,239 8,603 402 12 12,256 187.3
6 Turkey 72,561,312 261 11,434   0 11,695 161.2
7 Australia 22,469,943 1,107 2,238 195 0 3,540 157.5
8 Germany 81,802,257 3,083 8,419 686 0 12,188 149.0
9 Hong Kong 7,173,900 0 1041 0 0 1,041 145.1
10 United States 310,314,000 16,407 11,073 1154 1,494 30,128 97.1
11 Belgium 10,839,905 227 727 39 0 993 91.6
12 Portugal 10,636,888 384 548 1 0 933 87.7
13 Singapore 5,076,700 185 179 4 0 368 72.5
14 Spain 46,072,834 978 1,981 11 0 2,970 64.5
15 Netherlands 16,678,200 59 859 2 0 920 55.2
16 Italy 60,402,499 1,687 1,519 96 0 3,302 54.7
17 Norway 4,985,870 37 187 14 0 238 47.7
18 Chile 17,133,000 210 530   0 740 43.2
19 Sweden 9,580,424 0 326 43 0 369 38.5
20 Denmark 5,574,000 66 128 16 0 210 37.7