Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook saw a surge in the number of user data requests from several world governments in the first six months of 2014, but the US leads the pack by far.

Facebook’s third Government Requests Report shows that the number of private data requests by governments was 24% higher in the first half of 2014 than it was in the last half of 2013, with the number reaching nearly 35,000 requests.

The US government is responsible for 15,433 of those requests. By comparison, the next highest country on the report, India, sent only 4,559. In fact, the number of requests from the US is more than the next seven highest countries in the report combined.

Breakdown of the top 10 countries requesting private data

Facebook is adamant that they only comply with data requests that are completely legal and do not infringe on their user’s rights. In the statement released with the report, Facebook said:

As we’ve said before, we scrutinize every government request we receive for legal sufficiency under our terms and the strict letter of the law, and push back hard when we find deficiencies or are served with overly broad requests.

Facebook made special mention of a recent request from a New York court that asked for the private data of almost 400 people. The company said that despite setbacks in the case, they are “aggressively pursuing” appeals that would invalidate the court’s warrants, forcing them to return all seized data.

But the report also shows that of the nearly 16,000 data requests Facebook received from the US government, the social media company complied with over 80%. This is the highest rate out of the top 10 countries.

The Facebook Q&A with Mark Zuckerberg, which is open to the community, will be taking place later today. In addition to complaints about Facebook Messenger, search, and other features, some of the top questions on the Q&A page itself relate to privacy concerns.

Facebook’s statement on the government report says:

We will continue to work on our own and with partners, such as the Reform Government Surveillance coalition, to protect the information of the people who use our services.