Reddit Issues First Transparency Report

Reddit, the hugely popular Internet message board, released its first transparency report Thursday afternoon, giving its 174 million regular visitors a closer look into how often outside agencies request user information.

Releasing transparency reports, which detail the number of requests for user data from government agencies, has become commonplace for Internet companies in Silicon Valley. Pioneered by Google four years ago, transparency reports have been issued by other major companies like Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and Yahoo in recent years.

Reddit, by comparison, has received far fewer requests for data on its users than those major companies. Reddit received only 55 requests for user data in 2014, according to the report. That is dwarfed by the roughly 32,000 requests Google received in the first six months of that year, and the nearly 35,000 that Facebook received over the same six-month period.

And unlike Facebook and others, Reddit has never once received a National Security Letter, an order issued under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for user information. Until only recently, tech companies were not allowed to disclose that they had even received these sorts of government requests, which officials say are in the interest of national security.

The relatively small number of requests for data is most likely because of Reddit’s stance on collecting user information, which is fairly limited. New Reddit users are required only to give an email address and password when signing up for the service. The company stores user Internet Protocol addresses, which can help identify a particular device used to connect to the Internet, for up to 90 days before getting rid of them entirely.

That is in stark contrast to Google or Facebook, which retain highly personal details about users’ lives and activities, mostly to target advertising.

The company did, however, receive more than 200 content removal requests from outside companies, according to the report, most of which were on grounds of copyright or trademark infringement.

The report did not specify what type of content removal was requested. But Reddit said it complied with fewer than half the requests, because the content often was not posted directly to Reddit.

“Because links do not generally infringe copyright, we exercise extra scrutiny in assessing takedowns for links,” the company said.