Reddit Releases First Transparency Report, Refused To Comply With 42 Percent of Requests In 2014

Reddit - an entertainment, social networking service and news website - released its first ever transparency report. According to the report, Reddit refused to comply with 42 percent of government and civil requests last year.

"We regularly get requests from governments and law enforcement agencies for private information about our users or to remove content or subreddits; we occasionally get formal subpoenas and legal requests from individuals. These requests are usually legitimate; we push back on any that we view as overbroad or unnecessarily invasive of privacy," Reddit said in a Thursday blog post.

In addition, Reddit refused to follow 69 percent of all requests to remove content from the site.

Interestingly, according to the transparency report, Reddit only received 55 requests over the entire year, compared to Google that received around 32,000 requests in the first half of 2014.

 "Many government requests we receive contain demands to withhold notice from users that carry no legal weight. We actively disregard these non-binding demands. Our goal is to give users the information they need to seek legal advice before their records are disclosed. As stated in our privacy policy, we provide advance notice to affected users unless prohibited by a court order or where we decide delayed notice is appropriate based on clear criteria," reads Reddit's report.

"A significant percentage of the copyright takedown requests we received were for user-submitted URLs that link to content hosted on other websites. Because links do not generally infringe copyright, we exercise extra scrutiny in assessing takedowns for links."