In the US there has also been an uptick in the number of requests to hand over users’ private data to government agencies, from 5950 to 6321. Google complied in 93% of cases; which is to be expected from a US company tightly bound by US law. Elsewhere in the world, Google has been more reticent in its compliance.
“Google has a far lower rate of complying with foreign requests, however,” reported Forbes. “It only fulfilled 64% of U.K. requests and 45% of German requests, for instance, and complied with none of the requests from Russia or Turkey.”
Forbes was told that an example of the type of requests Google receives would be for users’ IP addresses, which law enforcement would then “use to locate individuals involved in criminal cases such as kidnapping.” The company attempts to find a balance between protecting its users and doing “right by the spirit and letter of the law.”
But in announcing this latest 'Transparency Report', Google itself is concerned about the growing desire for governments to control content. When we started these reports, notes Dorothy Chou, “We noticed that government agencies from different countries would sometimes ask us to remove political content that our users had posted on our services. We hoped this was an aberration. But now we know it’s not.” She goes on to cite two recent examples from Western governments not normally associated with censorship. “Spanish regulators asked us to remove 270 search results that linked to blogs and articles in newspapers referencing individuals and public figures, including mayors and public prosecutors. In Poland, we received a request from a public institution to remove links to a site that criticized it. We didn’t comply with either of these requests.”
Government requests, however, are dwarfed by the copyright removal requests received, and acted on, by Google. Unlike the biannual government reports, copyright figures are maintained on a daily basis. This part of the 'Transparency Report' was launched just last month. The most recent figures show that Google received 1,923,395 requests to remove specific URLs from searches leading to alleged copyright infringing material in the last month alone. Google complies with about 97% of these requests.