Are there any plans for a Steemit warrant canary or transparency report?
A warrant canary is a colloquial term for a regularly published statement that a service provider has not received legal process (like a national security letter) that it would be prohibited from disclosing to the public. Once a service provider does receive legal process, the speech prohibition goes into place, and the provider no longer makes the statement about the number of such process received.
Warrant canaries are often provided in conjunction with a transparency report, listing the processes the service provider can publicly say it received over the course of a particular time period. The term "warrant canary" is a reference to the canaries used to provide warnings in coalmines, which would become sick before miners from carbon monoxide poisoning, warning of the otherwise-invisible danger.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/01/eff-joins-coalition-launch-canarywatchorg
https://canarywatch.org/about.html#anatomy
https://canarywatch.org/faq.html
Does steemit currently have any plans to implement a warrant canary or transparency report?
Steem is fully transparent. Law enforcement has complete access to our database, aka the block chain.
What information would they ask for?
IP addresses of users accessing steemit.com is the first thing that comes to my mind.
A few things come to mind. Usernames, email addresses, the linked reddit\facebook account info, ip addresses accessed from, steem wallet addresses, and the upcoming private communication features. Are you saying this is all easily retrievable from the steem blockchain, and there are no privacy protections in place for this data?
Info gathering is not the only reason to implement a canary, access to or coercion of the dev team to implement backdoors or manipulate the price is also a threat. If the code is entirely open source it negates some of these threats, but a canary stating no contact has been made gives confidence for investors in the cryptocoin component .
The lavabit case http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/20/why-did-lavabit-shut-down-snowden-email and rogue silk road agents http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/31/how-rogue-u-s-agents-allegedly-shook-down-mt-gox.html are examples of some good reasons to have canaries in place.
Facebook and emails are kept private.
That's worse than no answer. What does "kept private" mean, and what about the rest?