The Latest to Disclose Government Requests, Yahoo Reveals the Least

Following in the footsteps of Facebook, Microsoft and Apple, Yahoo disclosed some broad data about the number of requests that American law enforcement authorities had made for data about its users.

From Dec. 1, 2012, to May 31, 2013, the Internet company received between 12,000 and 13,000 requests from the government, related to everything from local crimes to terrorism investigations under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. “The most common of these requests concerned fraud, homicides, kidnappings, and other criminal investigations,” the company said in a post on Tumblr, the blogging platform it recently acquired. Unlike the other companies, which have been criticized for disclosing too little information, Yahoo did not specify how many users were included in the 12,000 to 13,000 requests. But like the other companies, Yahoo said that the government would not permit it to break out more specific data on the number of FISA data requests, which the government considers so secret that companies aren’t supposed to even acknowledge their existence.