It’s been nearly a year since Edward Snowden leaked piles of government documents and revealed NSA spying programs like PRISM to the public. In the frenzied fallout surrounding the leak, companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft asked the government for permission to publish data about the surveillance requests that they had received.

Initially, the government gave its approval for the companies to reveal reports about precisely how many data requests they had received from both the United States government and other world governments over the course of specific time periods. However, now, it appears that Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are all tired of infringing upon the privacy of their users and waiting for further government permissions.

According to a report published in The Washington Post on Thursday, all four global technology companies are planning on updating their privacy policies so that they can notify individual users whenever their data is requested by government agencies. In essence, these new policies will represent a direct defiance of government wishes.

When federal agencies like the NSA come to Facebook, Google, or any other technology company asking for data on a specific user, they bring a subpoena along that has been covertly issued without the knowledge of whoever is being investigated. The subpoena urges the technology company in question not to notify the user under investigation. However, in a stunning show of loyalty to their customers, many tech companies will now simply ignore that small provision and go ahead with warning investigated parties.

Naturally, the government will not be too pleased with this development, since it could hamper their investigations and give supposed criminal a chance to head for the hills or destroy evidence of their crimes. However, tech companies that already have such “full disclosure” policies in place – such as Yahoo! – have reported that authorities do not approach them with as many data requests because they know that doing so could compromise their investigations. In other words, perhaps Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Apple are simply trying to get to a point where they can stop having to deal with pesky government officials.