When Reddit updated its privacy policy a couple of weeks back, it promised an annual transparency report. Now they are making good on its promise by publishing details on user stats as well as takedown requests the site received in 2014.
The report reveals that Reddit received a mere 55 requests for data on 78 of its users last year, and the company handed over at least some information, made up of either account registration data, logs, or uploaded content, for only 32 of those requests.
Reddit says that several government requests it receives contain demands to withhold notice from users that carry no legal weight, adding that the company actively disregards these non-binding demands."Our goal is to give users the information they need to seek legal advice before their records are disclosed."
The report also notes that the company received a total of 218 content removal requests, of which 176 alleged copyright violation, 9 alleged trademark violation, while 33 were marked as 'others'. Reddit removed content only in 31 percent of those cases, or 68 requests.
"A significant percentage of the copyright takedown requests we received were for user-submitted URLs that link to content hosted on other websites. Because links do not generally infringe copyright, we exercise extra scrutiny in assessing takedowns for links," the report said.
It’s also worth noting that no requests for the removal of content came from US federal or state governments.
Considering that Reddit boasts more than 174 million users, the number of requests the company received is quite low. In contrast, Google’s latest transparency report revealed they had received 3,105 government requests to remove 14,637 pieces of content between July and December 2013. Dropbox, which published its latest report days ago, received 275 government data requests from July through December 2014.
https://www.techspot.com/news/59578-reddit-hops-transparency-bandwagon-releases-first-report.html
