Google has always claimed that they want to maximize transparency around the flow of information related to their services. I always took this statement with a grain of salt, as I would from any large corporation trying to explain how transparent and open they were with the public. However, a recent update by Google has done a great job revealing information about government intervention and online content.
Recently, Google has updated their Transparency Report to include more details about information requested from governments around the world. This report has been used to provide data about the number of government inquiries concerning specific users or accounts, as well as requests to remove specific content.
According to this post on their blog, Google has “highlighted some significant changes in the data and provided context about why those changes may have occurred during this reporting period.” They have updated the format of the report so that anyone can see user data requests on a country-by country basis.
The Transparency Report is now very detailed. Using Government Requests, Google is disclosing whether they were asked for user data or for content removal, the reasons why they’ve been asked to remove content (such as hate speech, defamation, copyright, etc…), even the percentage of requests that Google complied with.
For those that are curious, the United States ranks third overall in the amount of content removal requests, and first overall in user data requests (by a huge gap).
Some requests for removing content in the last six months (January to June 2011) included everything from violation of AdWords policies (China) and defamation cases (France) to the removal of YouTube videos displaying protests (India), police brutality (USA) and details about the private lives of political officials (Turkey). For more details, see the Map of requests.
It’s really quite amazing what you can learn about how the web is shaped by government influence and other regulations. In my opinion, Google is providing a great (and interesting) service by publishing this data.
