Both companies stressed that even the overall numbers of requests were tiny in comparison to their user bases. The number of national security-related requests likely make up a relatively small proportion of these requests. According to Ted Ullyot, Facebook’s general counsel:
With more than 1.1 billion monthly active users worldwide, this means that a tiny fraction of one percent of our user accounts were the subject of any kind of U.S. state, local, or federal U.S. government request (including criminal and national security-related requests) in the past six months. We hope this helps put into perspective the numbers involved, and lays to rest some of the hyperbolic and false assertions in some recent press accounts about the frequency and scope of the data requests that we receive.
John Frank, Microsoft’s deputy general counsel, wrote that what the government had asked for was far more modest than the general monitoring program described by the Guardian and Washington Post last week.
“We have not received any national security orders of the type that Verizon was reported to have received that required Verizon to provide business records about U.S. customers,” he wrote.