How likely is it that the NSA reads your personal data?
(originally posted 13.10.2015 on Google+)


When you listen to Snowden and the media, and reports about the European Court of Justice ruling about SafeHarbor, you may have the impression that the NSA has an almost unfettered access to the data of European Facebook users. But what are the facts?

Fortunately, the American Internet companies are now allowed to publish transparancy reports about national security user data requests, so we have some solid data to answer this question.

According to the Facebook report[1], there are FISA requests for about 16.000 Facebook users per year. Currently Facebook has about 1.44 billion active users[2]. So the chance that the NSA collects the personal data of a Facebook user is about 0.001%. Or one of 100.000. Impressing, isn't it?

Your chances with Google are slightly better. There are FISA requests for about 32.000 user accounts per year[3]. Gmail has about 900 million users[4]. This means a chance of at least 0.0035%. Wow!

Realitycheck anyone?

[1] https://govtrequests.facebook.com/country/United%20States/2014-H1
[2] http://investor.fb.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=908022
[3] https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/userdatarequests/US/
[4] https://plus.google.com/+Gmail/posts/AjktcDswdKh