Wall Street Journal: Google Discloses Requests on Users
The Wall Street Journal reports that Google has revealed the number of requests about its users’ data made by the United States and other governments.
The Silicon Valley giant Tuesday disclosed for the first time the number of requests it has received from government agencies for data about its users. Google also disclosed how many government requests it gets to remove content from its search engine, YouTube video site, Blogger blogging software and other services.
Google is also showing how often it complies with government demands to remove Web content and said it later plans to include how often it turns over data on users. Google’s disclosure tool, an online country map, excluded data for China where Google says numerating the requests would be illegal. [...]
Google’s move comes as its critics continue to accuse the company and its peers of being reckless with user data. On Tuesday, a group of privacy commissioners from countries including Canada, France and the United Kingdom held a press conference to push Google to build better privacy protections into its services. On Monday, the group sent a letter scolding Google over privacy. [...]
Privacy advocates—who have long hounded Internet companies to be more open about how they use what they collect—praised the move. “It puts some numbers behind all the stories we have,” said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based digital rights non-proft organization.
Others cautioned the raw numbers are hard to interpret, in part because there is little to compare them with. But they said that showing how countries stack up is a first step. [...]
The company’s new disclosure tool shows that Brazil made the most requests for user data during the last six months of 2009, with 3,663. The U.S. was second with 3,580. Brazil also led with 291 requests for removal of content, with Germany in second place and the U.S. fourth, behind India. [...]
The Mountain View, Calif., company stressed limitations to the data, which don’t include countries where it receives a small amount of requests or statistics that could jeopardize important investigations. In the case of YouTube, the company said the data doesn’t include requests by government agencies for removal of copyrighted content.
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