IN an effort towards greater transparency, social networking giant Facebook released its latest ‘Government Requests Report’ containing bare-bones data on requests they receive from countries for access to user account data, and requests to restrict access to content.

The current January-June 2014 report is the third such dataset Facebook has released, and, staying true to form, Pakistan’s requests to restrict content has increased nearly ten-fold compared to the previous period.

For Pakistanis on Facebook, this translates to 1,773 areas of the social network that we could not access as of June, and by now, that number has in all likelihood doubled.

There were also 116 requests by our government to access data from user accounts, of which 35.34 per cent resulted in the production of ‘some’ data. In other words, around 40 accounts had their privacy invaded through the state’s efforts and Facebook’s acquiescence.

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