To quell public worry that it and other tech companies were actively sharing user info with the National Security Agency (NSA), Yahoo released its first ever transparency report.
The report details how many times global government agencies requested data information from Yahoo over a six-month span. The report included 17 countries from the Americas, Asia Pacific, Latin America and Europe.
According to The New York Times, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter and Google already make similar reports.
For Yahoo, it was a first, and the web company only released information from January 1, 2013 to June 30, 2013. The report said it had received 12,444 requests for info and only rejected two percent of those requests.
The report also noted the countries outside the U.S. whose governments asked for information, which included Britain, Mexico, India, New Zealand, Italy and Brazil. Of the 12,444 data requests, Yahoo disclosed content to an agency 4,604 times. Yahoo also made 6,798 non-content disclosures, which includes info like name, location, IP address and other transactional information.
"At Yahoo, we take user privacy seriously and appreciate our role as a global company in promoting freedom of expression wherever we do business," the company said.
In late August, Facebook released a transparency report on the first six months of 2013 and said 74 countries requested data from about 37,954 users. In July, Twitter stated it received 1,157 requests spanning 1,697 users and said it disclosed information in 55 percent of the cases.
Yahoo wrote in its report that they planned to continually release these transparency reports every six months.
"We regularly push back against improper requests for user data, including fighting requests that are unclear, improper, overbroad or unlawful," Ron Bell, Yahoo's general counsel, wrote in a blog post on the company's website. "In addition, we mounted a two-year legal challenge to the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and recently won a motion requiring the U.S. government to consider further declassifying court documents from that case."
