EFF Gov't Data Requests 2017 report finds Adobe, Dropbox, Pinterest, Uber, Wickr, and WordPress best protect users; AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, T-Mobile fall short
Download the complete Who Has Your Back? 2017: Protecting Your Data From Government Requests report as a PDF. — Executive Summary
Context & Ripple Effects
EFF's Who Has Your Back? scorecard is now a recurring benchmark: its 2015 edition already lauded Apple and Dropbox while slamming Verizon, so the 2017 results read less as a surprise than a confirmation that the same divide persists. The report lands amid a broader wave of accountability projects — from Ranking Digital Rights' launch to company-by-company transparency disclosures like Facebook's H1 2017 report showing ~79K account data requests — all pressuring companies to disclose how they handle government demands.
The split the report draws is structural: internet platforms (Adobe, Dropbox, Pinterest, Uber, Wickr, WordPress) cluster at the top, while the major carriers (AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, T-Mobile) fall short — a pattern visible since the 2015 edition.
First-order effects
- Dropbox extends its streak as a repeat top scorer across both the 2015 and 2017 editions, turning EFF recognition into a marketable trust credential, while AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and T-Mobile face renewed public scoring of their government-request practices for a second cycle.
Second-order effects
- Carriers' repeated low marks give privacy-focused rivals and over-the-top services a differentiation lever at exactly the moment transparency reports (Facebook's, Amazon's earlier first disclosure) are becoming standard competitive artifacts, raising the cost of staying opaque.
Third-order effects
- With independent scorecards like EFF's and Ranking Digital Rights now running on multi-year cycles, government-data handling is hardening into a measured, comparable dimension of corporate reputation — one telcos can no longer opt out of without documented cost.
The trend: Government data-request practices are shifting from undisclosed policy to independently scored public commitments, with platform companies outpacing carriers year after year.