The FINANCIAL — Georgia had no single request for personal data from Google, according to Google's initial data published on company's website.
United States made the largest number of data requests. It's followed by Brasil, India and United Kingdom.
Google regularly receives requests from government agencies and federal courts around the world to remove content from its services and hand over user data. Governments ask companies to remove content for many different reasons. For example, some content removals are requested due to allegations of defamation, while others are due to allegations that the content violates local laws prohibiting hate speech or pornography. Laws surrounding these issues vary by country, and the requests reflect the legal context of a given jurisdiction.
Six court orders from United States resulted in the removal of 1,110 items from Google Groups relating to a case of continuous defamation against a man and his family. From Brasil more than 50% of content removal requests in period of January-June 2010 are related to orkut. Atypically, in a non-orkut-related lawsuit, one court ordered removal of more than 18,000 photos from Picasa. The lawsuit alleged that the photos contained images of pages from copyrighted books.
The number of content removal requests Google received from France in January-June 2010 increased by 150% compared to the previous reporting period.
Country Data Requests Percentage of data requests fully or partially complied with
Argentina 127 40%
Australia 345 81%
Belgium 85 73%
Brazil 1,804 76%
Canada 38 55%
Chile 121 66%
France 1,021 56%
Germany 768 76%
Hong Kong 90 59%
Hungary 68 0%
India 1,699 79%
Israel 54 76%
Italy 837 60%
Japan 72 90%
Mexico 34 56%
Netherlands 43 67%
Poland 272 12%
Portugal 92 43%
Singapore 118 88%
South Korea 190 45%
Spain 359 61%
Switzerland – –
Taiwan 156 65%
Turkey 45 0%
United Kingdom 1,162 72%
United States 4,601 94%
Privacy International, UK registered non-profit private limited company has recently interviewed Google about reasons behind of giving personal data to the governments. Below is an interview published on Privacy International website:
Why are you doing this?
Google: We have been thinking about doing this sort of reporting for some time. We believe that transparency will give people insight into these kinds of government requests. Historically, information like this has not been broadly available. We hope this tool will be helpful in discussions about the appropriate scope and authority of government requests and that other companies will make similar disclosures.
Q. Aren't you afraid of a backlash from governments?
Google: We hope this tool will give citizens greater visibility into their governments' actions. The information reported is straightforward and factual and we plan to continue to improve it. We believe it is important to start a global conversation about how governments regulate the Internet. Unless companies, governments and individuals work together, the free flow of information that we enjoy today may become ever more restricted.
Q. Have you considered the risk that countries may use this data to justify their actions on the basis of being "not the worst" or "amongst the best"?
Google: It's important to keep in mind that the information we're presenting is limited in several ways. First of all, it only reflects the requests received by Google, when in fact similar requests are being made of other Internet and communications companies. Second, some countries where the state controls access to the Internet may be blocking or collecting data at the ISPs, obviating the need to send requests to application providers, like Google. Government activity on the Internet today is sophisticated and multi-dimensional. It would be wrong to draw conclusions based on the data in our report alone. We need more companies or governments to provide similar information in order to get an accurate picture.
ABOUT LAWFUL ACCESS
Q. What types of information and/or unique identifiers do you keep and for how long? Are some of your decisions on retention affected by the numbers of requests you get from Governments? If so, how?
Google: In broad terms, we typically have two types of information about the users of our services: unauthenticated data which is not correlated to a specific person and authenticated data which is. Many of our services can be used without registering for the service (for example, Google search) and therefore we do not ask for any personally identifying information. For those services, we may have unauthenticated logs data and our retention policy is to obfuscate the IP addresses after 9 months and delete the cookie after 18 months. We also offer services that require user registration, such as Gmail or Blogger. For those services, we retain personal data in accordance with our privacy policy. Our policies for retaining data are based on a number of factors, including what is necessary for the operation of the service and what is best for the users.
Q. What is the largest number of people you have disclosed data about in a single request?
Google: We can't currently count our historical data in this way, but we're looking at how we can provide greater meaningful transparency around user requests in the future.
FUTURE TRANSPARENCY PLANS
Q. Will you break down the statistics about the data you disclose as follows, or if that is not possible specify how you define the number of requests you receive for data?
Google: Given the complexity, we haven't figured out a way to categorize and quantify the requests in a way that adds meaningful transparency, but we plan to in the future.
Q. Do you intend to identify the general justification in each case (e.g. law enforcement, national security, private litigation)? Will you identify the nature of the data that is disclosed in each case?
Google: It's too early to say how the tool will be develop, but we plan to add more meaningful transparency as we figure out how to do so.
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