Reddit is a popular site for sharing links, finding the latest cool thing and making connections. However, it's also a website with millions upon millions of users, which makes it hard to track and manage. This fact has annoyed many government officials, who wish to know more about any potentially "shady" activity that may occur on the site. But how often did the officials make such queries, and to what extent?
After years of requests asking for more information, Reddit promised its users a new level of transparency that would answer such questions. And now Reddit has fulfilled the promise. Reddit released via blog post its first transparency report, with full records of who asked for more data regarding Reddit's userbase or requested that links be removed.
Reddit reported that it only received 55 requests from officials for user information of 78 different accounts in 2014. Of those accounts, Reddit confirmed that 32 of those requests were legitimate, and provided the requested account registration data, logs or uploaded content.
According to the data, only 53 percent of the data asked for was through a U.S. subpoena. However, Reddit always did its best to make sure that users were alerted when their information was requested by legal authorities. The only cases where Reddit did not alert individuals to the legal system accessing their accounts was when a judge asked it not to, or when there was a threat of immediate physical harm to someone.
On top of that, Reddit received more than 200 content removal requests in 2014, the majority dealing with issues of copyright violation. Reddit reportedly only fulfilled 31 percent of the requests (a total of 68 requests). The majority of those requests were for user-submitted URLs, which would not (necessarily) count as a copyright infringement on Reddit's part.
As a whole, the amount of copyright infringement requests and subpoenas that Reddit receives are exceptionally low for a site with as much traffic as Reddit receives. This is especially clear when compared to the amount that Google and Dropbox receive, which each receive more than 3,000 requests a year.
