Legal request transparency report

[clementbiron]

Type name

Transparency report

Alternative type names

Transparency statement
Government Requests

Writer

service provider

Audience

end user

Object

legal demands to remove content or produce account information

Examples

Example	Service Name	URL	Title	Jurisdiction(s)
1	Proton	URL 🔗	Transparency report	-
2	Threema	URL 🔗	Transparency Report	-
3	Apple	URL 🔗	Transparency Report	🌐
4	Apple	URL 🔗	Transparency Report Australia	🇦🇺
5	Meta	URL 🔗	Government Requests for User Data	🌐
6	Meta	URL 🔗	Government Requests for User Data	🇫🇷
7	X	URL 🔗	Information Requests	🌐
8	X	URL 🔗	Information Requests	🇺🇸
9	X	URL 🔗	Removal Requests	🌐
10	Apple App Store	URL 🔗	App Store Transparency Report	🌐

References

No response

Comments

No response

[MattiSG]

While this topic is extremely interesting, these documents do not constitute norms. They do not describe rights and duties for any user or provider of services.
While the DSA mandates transparency reports for VLOPS, which can be interpreted as users having a right to reading this content, Open Terms Archive does not aim at guaranteeing such rights, but at tracking the sources of rights.

On the other hand, tracking such data and its consistency does go towards shifting the power balance from online platforms towards regulators and end users, which is the political goal of Open Terms Archive.

At a technical level, the Open Terms Archive engine is not the most appropriate for tracking such content, as it often is published in independent documents for each reporting period, meaning that manual updates will be needed on each period change.
It is also worth noting that a lack of inclusion of such a type in the default terms types does not mean that the Open Terms Archive engine will not be able to track such documents: it would simply mean that entities willing to use the engine for such tracking would have to create their own type for it.

At this stage, I am not in favour of adding this type. There are many documents that would be interesting to preserve and track over time, but that go beyond Open Terms Archive's focus. We should first consolidate Open Terms Archive in its current scope before expanding and enabling broader use cases for which the engine is not optimised.