Watching the world
Google frequently receives requests from government agencies and police forces around the world for usage data on named individuals in investigations, from data compiled by Google's various tracking tools. Now Google has released top line statistics to show which countries made the most information requests over the last year.
The figures show that top of the list with info requests is Brazil with 3,663 requests followed by the USA with 3,580 requests. China is excluded from the Google statistics as the Chinese government regards the request itself as a state secret. Surprisingly, the UK came third on Google's list, with 1,166 requests, slightly ahead of India with 1,061. No other country topped the thousand request mark, and our EU cousins, France, Italy and Germany respectively made 856, 550 and 458 requests to Google.
One way of looking at those figures is to say that the USA and Brazil ask Google for search records three times as often as the UK does. On the other hand, if you compare that to the number of citizens in each county, Britain and Brazil both lead the list, making 19 requests per million of population, compared to just 13 per million from France, 12 per million from the USA, and less than 10 per million from every other country in Europe and the World.
So how should we interpret that? Does this mean that the UK police force is more pro-active and vigilant in using all available resources to combat crime and terrorism? Or does it mean that they are performing more fishing expeditions without the necessity of going through UK courts to obtain search warrants? And if Google really does anonymise our data as it frequently claims it does, how can it so easily supply usage info to so many requests?
30th April 2010