Posted by Dorothy Chou, Senior Policy Analyst Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog Transparency Report in early 2010, there wasn’t much data out there about how governments sometimes hamper the free flow of information on the web. So we took our first step toward greater transparency by disclosing the number of government requests we received. At the time, we weren’t sure how things would look beyond that first snapshot, so we pledged to release numbers twice a year. Today we’re updating the Transparency Report with data about government requests from January to June 2012.user data and to remove content from our services in the Transparency Report itself, but in aggregate around the world, the numbers continue to go up.annotations for this time period with interesting facts. We’re also showing new bar graphs with data in addition to tables to better display content removal trends over time. We’ve now translated the entire Transparency Report into 40 languages, and we’ve expanded our FAQ—including one that explains how we sometimes receive falsified court orders asking us to remove content. We do our best to verify the legitimacy of the documents we receive, and if we determine that any are fake, we don’t comply.Dropbox , LinkedIn , Sonic.net and Twitter have begun to share their statistics too. Our hope is that over time, more data will bolster public debate about how we can best keep the Internet free and open.
Thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteIndeed, thanks for sharing! Google leads the way on helping us understand how open the Internet really is, worldwide. One question I would ask is whether you believe society is maturing in the ways in which people and governments are making these requests. That is- are governments changing their laws to be more draconian, requiring you to comply more, are they not bothering with requests they know you'll turn down, or are your overall refusals actually increasing? Have you analyzed this?
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