Surprisingly, it was the nation’s smallest wireless carrier that received the greatest number of government data requests last year. In its first evertransparency report, T-Mobile revealed that it fielded a staggering 351,940 requests for consumer information in 2014 alone—more than any of its rivals and a 10.8 percent increase compared to the year prior.

Of the four national wireless carriers, Sprint was the runner up in government data requests last year, having received 308,937. Verizon and AT&T —which have customer bases nearly twice the size of T-Mobile’s—rounded out the group with 287,559 and 263,755 requests, respectively.

According to T-Mobile, civil and criminal subpoenas accounted for 177,549 of its hundreds of thousands of requests. The next next most prominent category was emergency requests, of which there were 97,440. T-Mobile received a total of 34,913 court orders, making it the third most common type of request. Beyond that, the wireless carrier also handled 17,316 warrants and 3,087 wiretap orders. Comparatively,  AT&T, Verizon and Sprint received 2,420, 1,433 and 3,772  wiretap orders, respectively.

In the wake of the Edward Snowden leak, the release of these such transparency reports by major companies has grown in prominence. Sprint, Verizon and AT&T all issued transparency reports before T-Mobile quietly published its report on Wednesday. Back in 2010, Google was the first company to publish the number of subpoenas, warrants, and orders from the government it was forced to satisfy, reported ZDNet. 

(Credit: Web)