Who has your back when it comes to protecting your private data from an increasingly prying government? It is not easy to tell which companies seriously protect your privacy when the government comes calling with or more likely without a warrant.

But now the EFF has prepared a report detailing the privacy protection policies (or lack of policies) among the largest data gathering companies. The bottom line: Trust Twitter to protect your privacy, but don’t expect Apple and Verizon to do the same.

When you use the Internet, you entrust your conversations, thoughts, experiences, locations, photos, and more to companies like Google, AT&T and Facebook. But what do these companies do when the government demands your private information? Do they stand with you? Do they let you know what’s going on?

In this annual report, the Electronic Frontier Foundation examined the policies of major Internet companies — including ISPs, email providers, cloud storage providers, location-based services, blogging platforms, and social networking sites — to assess whether they publicly commit to standing with users when the government seeks access to user data. The purpose of this report is to incentivize companies to be transparent about how data flows to the government and encourage them to take a stand for user privacy whenever it is possible to do so.

Related articles

• EFF Surveys Major Tech Companies’ Privacy and Transparency Policies (eff.org)
• ISPs ‘In Conspiracy Of Silence With Government On Snooper’s Charter’ (techweekeurope.co.uk)