Government censorship and surveillance of online activity around the globe increased markedly over the course of the first six months of 2012, Google reported Tuesday.
The news came in Google’s latest biannual update to its ongoing Transparency Report, a project the search giant began in 2010 that keeps track of the number of and source of personal information and content takedown requests submitted by governments, law enforcement agencies, companies and other organizations around the world — requests that seek not only users’ private information, but the removal or blockage of specific content on Google’s myriad websites and services.
“This is the sixth time we’ve released this data, and one trend has become clear: Government surveillance is on the rise,” wrote Dorothy Chou, Google’s senior policy analyst, in an official company blog post.
Specifically, over the period of January through June 2012, Google received 20,938 requests for the personal information of 34,614 accounts, up from just over 18,000 such requests in the last reporting period, July through December 2011, and up from just about 12,500 in July through December 2009, when Google began keeping track for the Transparency Report.
The United States led the globe in terms of requests for Google user data with 7,969 individual requests, though Google notes that some of these requests came from abroad and were routed through U.S. authorities. Google complied with 90 percent of these. India took the second spot this time around, with 2,319 requests for user data, and Google only complied with 64 percent of these.
Here’s a graph from Google showing the increase in government requests for user data over the last three years:
Furthermore, there was an even greater increase in takedown notices from world governments and law enforcement agencies over the same six-month period, up to 1,791 different requests for Google to remove content, from 1,048 during the last period.
Here’s another Google graph illustrating the trend:
In the case of court ordered content takedown notices, Google’s Transparency Report for January to June 2012 indicates that the most by a longshot came from the United States, where 209 court orders were submitted, and Google complied with 44 percent of them.
When it comes to other types of takedown requests — where Google lumps together those made by law enforcement agencies and other governmental bodies — Turkey leads the pack with 453 requests, followed by 79 from the United Kingdom. The U.S. is tied with India at fourth with 64 requests:
“The number of government requests to remove content from our services was largely flat from 2009 to 2011,” Chou wrote. “But it’s spiked in this reporting period.”
Fortunately for Web users and content owners, and unfortunately for those submitting the requests, Google has actually been complying with less of them as the number of requests have increased, as the following graph from the search company illustrates:
Google’s overall fulfillment rate of takedown requests has dropped from around 75 percent at the end of 2010 to just over 50 percent now.
As for why Google doesn’t comply with all the requests it receives, the search giant notes in its Transparency Report FAQ that:
“Some requests may not be specific enough for us to know what the government wanted us to remove (for example, no URL is listed in the request), and others involve allegations of defamation through informal letters from government agencies, rather than court orders. We generally rely on courts to decide if a statement is defamatory according to local law.”
In another development, Google added a new section to its FAQ noting that it has been receiving phony, fraudulent court orders, specifically one posturing as a Canadian court order from New Brunswick and one purporting to be from the U.S. District Court in Pennsylvania.
“We do examine the legitimacy of the documents that we receive, and if we determine that a court order is false, we will not comply with it,” Google’s FAQ notes.
That’s not to say that Google tolerates all speech. The search giant openly notes in the Transparency Report FAQ: “The statistics we report here do not include content removals that we regularly process every day across our products for violation of our content policies (for example, we do not permit hate speech in Blogger and other similar products) in response to user complaints.”
Still, Google’s Chou wrote that Google hoped its policy of publishing takedown requests and requests for user information would “bolster public debate about how we can best keep the Internet free and open,” and noted that the Transparency Report has been echoed by similar initiatives from other leading web brands including Twitter, LinkedIn and Dropbox, among others. Still conspicuously missing from the list: Facebook and its 1.01 billion users.
