The Transparency Report
Google is in a special position. Not only does it know enormous amounts of data about our surfing habits, but it also has a massive influence, via its search engine results and sites like YouTube, on what information we can access. And both of those are of interest to governments and government agencies. To its credit, Google is the only major search engine which issues a Transparency Report, detailing the requests it receives to divulge information or delete content.
The Transparency Report for the first six months of 2011 shows that once again the USA leads the way, asking for data on 11,057 user accounts, an increase of 30% over the previous six months. That was followed by India, and in third place is UK law enforcement which has asked for information on 1,443 users over the six month period. In the case of the UK, the total number of requests is remaining reasonably flat year on year, and the gap between it and other EU countries is narrowing rapidly. It should be pointed out that Google does not automatically supply the requested data. For the US figure, it supplied data on 93% of the requested accounts. For the UK data, it released data on only 64% of the requested accounts.
The figures for YouTube show that UK authorities made 220 take-down requests in the first half of the year and the single biggest reason, 135 cases, was cited as matters of national security. Germany is the most active on take down requests, and its requests included the removal of 322 YouTube videos for reasons of hate speech. The report also discloses that 1814 items were removed from the Norwegian version of Google, but closer inspection reveals this was adword campaigns which violated Norway's marketing laws. Interestingly, on the USA report, Google says "We received a request from a local law enforcement agency to remove YouTube videos of police brutality, which we did not remove."
www.google.com/transparencyreport/
28th October 2011
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.