Australia has been ranked 8th globally in government surveillance. 

Around the world in 2020, the number of accounts specified in data requests for government surveillance increased from 0.9 million to 1.3 million - with Australia ranked 8th based on the online accounts requested by authorities from 2013 to 2020 (257 accounts per 100K people), in comparison to US (1st with 585/100K), UK (3rd with 486/100K).

Australia made 284 per cent more requests than the global average, but the US and EU authorities requested the most data.

On the other side, the latest study by cybersecurity company Surfshark shows Apple complied with the most user data requests (80 per cent) compared to Microsoft, Facebook, and Google (from 69 per cent to 72 per cent).

The experts say that their study shows government surveillance is growing, and the number of accounts requested globally increased more than four times from 2013 to 2020, with 2020 seeing the most significant year-over-year increase of almost 40 per cent.

Australia shows the same trend, with a 136 per cent increase from 2013 to 2020 - and in raw numbers - over 65,580 accounts during these 8 years, while requested accounts grew by 36 per cent in 2020 compared to 2019.

“The massive growth of online crime in 2020 went hand-in-hand with the increase in data requests that Big Tech companies received,” says Agneska Sablovskaja, Lead Researcher at Surfshark.

“Globally, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic saw a staggering year-over-year growth of accounts requested for government surveillance from 0.9M to 1.3M. This could be attributed to everything moving online, including crime.”