Yahoo and Google’s most recent transparency reports, released...

Yahoo and Google’s most recent transparency reports, released Thursday, showed both companies were rejecting a higher percentage of U.S. government requests for data than in the past. Although Google has received an increasing number of requests over the years -- from 12,593 in the second half of 2009 to 27,477 in the second half of 2013 -- the company partially or completely complied with a lower percentage of requests over that time span (http://bit.ly/1hyRz4d). Google complied with 76 percent of requests in the second half of 2010, and only 64 percent by the second half of 2013, according to the report. Yahoo rejected 2 percent of 12,444 government requests in the first half of 2013, but 8 percent of 6,587 requests in the second half of 2013 (http://bit.ly/1dyDhoY). Both companies are also now able to also release some information about how many national security orders they receive, and the number of customer accounts targeted with those orders, because of a recent Justice Department decision. Yahoo received fewer than 1,000 national security letters in the second half of 2013, naming between 1,000 and 2,000 users. The FBI issues national security letters to require companies to disclose information such as the name and address of a particular user, Yahoo said. Google had previously disclosed its national security order data in February (http://bit.ly/1dmIHMN). Overall, it was Yahoo’s second transparency report and Google’s ninth.