Verizon Publishes First Transparency Report on Data Requests

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Verizon said that last year it received roughly 320,000 requests for customer information from law enforcement agencies in the United States.Credit Eric Thayer/Reuters

Verizon Communications on Wednesday published a so-called transparency report describing when and why it receives requests for customer data, like phone records or emails, from law enforcement and government agencies.

Verizon is the first major phone carrier to publish a report of this kind — other carriers, like AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile US, have yet to take a similar step. Late last year, some activist shareholders of Verizon demanded that the company publish transparency reports to retain the trust of its customers. Several big technology companies, including Facebook, Apple and Google, have already published such reports.

“While we have a legal obligation to provide customer information to law enforcement in response to lawful demands, we take seriously our duty to provide such information only when authorized by law,” said Randal Milch, general counsel for Verizon, in a blog post about the report. “Our dedicated teams carefully review each demand and reject those that fail to comply with the law.”

In its report, Verizon described situations in which it responded to requests for data in the United States as well as requests for data in other countries where it does business, like Australia, France and Germany.

Verizon said it received roughly 320,000 requests for customer information last year from law enforcement agencies in the United States, including 164,000 subpoenas, 36,000 warrants and 70,000 court orders. It also received 1,000 to 2,000 requests from the National Security Agency.

Verizon also said it infrequently received requests from law enforcement agencies for contents of communications, like emails and text messages stored through its services. It said it received 14,500 warrants seeking stored content last year. And it reported receiving 1,500 wiretap orders, which allow law enforcement agencies access to the contents of a communication while it is taking place.

Verizon said its customers abroad generally use the company’s enterprise services, which means that most are probably businesses. The number of requests from overseas countries varied widely. At most, Verizon received 2,996 requests for information from law enforcement agencies in Germany, and at the lowest, it received one such information request from Taiwan.

The Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit group that focuses on digital rights, praised Verizon for publishing the transparency report.

“With this report, Verizon has set a strong precedent for transparency within the telecommunications industry,” Harley Geiger, a deputy director for the Center for Democracy and Technology, said in a statement. “The report has a level of detail that should be followed by other companies — including statistics on requests for location data, content, phone records and cell tower dumps, as well as specifying the legal authorities used.”

In November, Trillium Asset Management, the activist investment firm, filed a shareholder resolution pressuring Verizon to publish a transparency report. In response to the report published on Wednesday, Jonas Kron, a senior vice president of Trillium, said he had yet to review the details of the report thoroughly, but was pleased with the progress.

“Our goal in filing the shareholder proposal was to persuade companies to be issuing transparency reports. We’ve accomplished that goal,” he said. “We’ve now moved to this point of getting down to the details of what these reports contain and what the oversight is actually going to look like.”

Mr. Kron said he hoped that other carriers, including Sprint, would follow suit.