Study shows Apple, Google, and Meta are handing over user data at an alarming rate

Data is incredibly valuable these days, and as long as you aren’t living in internet-less societies, there’s already a host of information on you. It’s all exploitable, and everything has a price, especially for multinational companies that rake in more money on the daily than some of us will ever see over the course of our lives. While the debate over the ethics of selling data heavily carries on, who buys and sells the data is perhaps the more fiery topic. The US government buys data in troves from phone carriers, ISPs, social media companies, and more. This has been going on for years, and it doesn’t seem like there is a slowing down of this practice in sight. On the contrary, according to Proton.

Proton, a Swiss-based company that operates with privacy in the forefront, released a multi-year analysis that shows a massive increase in user data being handed over to American authorities over the last decade. Directly focusing on the big three of Big Tech — Google, Apple, and Meta — the amount of user account data that has been shared over a six-month period has gone up anywhere from 530% to 675% across each of the companies’ various platforms. This practice has continued to carry on regardless of what political party in the US has control, according to Proton. Additionally, across the countries that have signed the intelligence-sharing agreement called the Fourteen Eyes, the US’ increasing requests to Google, Apple, and Meta has grown in a more extreme way. This reigns true even as government requests from various other countries, like Germany, France, and the UK, have increased in their own rights.

Diving into the numbers

(Source: Proton)

The above images showcase the growing amount of account data shared with the US government by Google, Apple, and Meta from the second half of 2014 through the end of 2024. Additionally, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) content requests to all three companies have continued to climb, with requests rising by 2,171% to Google over the 10-year period. To Proton, and to many US (or otherwise) citizens, this data shows the danger of trusting companies that fail to implement widespread end-to-end encryption across all of their platforms.

All the information in this Proton report paints a dystopian present where the government is seemingly getting high on its own supply of data access to both its citizens and other countries’ citizens. Encrypted data has been under threat constantly, and even as the government has elicited fines and investigations against companies’ privacy practices over the years, the growing amount of data the US gets access to calls into question its decision-making in such cases. Companies do not want to share publicly that they willingly surrendered or sold information to governments, and unless reports come out saying that they, in fact, did surrender data, they have every reason to lie except for their owners’ moral standards. Let’s be honest, though: how many times has morality stopped the flow of money for Big Tech?