Governments of different countries are submitting more and more requests to Google to open access to user data

A regular Google Transparency Report was published yesterday, which demonstrates the interesting dynamics of requests from governments of different countries to Google, with the requirement to open access to user data and / or delete content of a specific nature. Actually, the whole report is devoted to describing the interaction of the corporation with the government bodies of different countries. As always, a half-year period is covered, from January to June 2011.

The publication of such reports has become a tradition for Google, since the current report is the fourth in a row. The compilers of the report state that with each new month the number of requests from government agencies of different levels and different countries increases (the subject of the request is in the title and the first paragraph). At the same time, more than all such requests are submitted by the center of democracy in the world, i.e. USA. For half a year in the USA about 6 thousand requests were filed (5950), of which more than two thirds were fulfilled. China is next to the United States in terms of the number of requests submitted; well, everything is clear here. In India, 1,700 requests were submitted, which relate to 2.4 thousand accounts of Indians.
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As for the CIS countries, the government bodies of this region have so far submitted very few requests to Google and other companies. In the same Russia, this figure is not in the thousands, but in the tens, which is significantly less than the United States, China, and India.

The total number of requests around the world is almost 16 thousand, which is 10% higher than last year’s level. For the year, this figure was 25,400 requests. Of course, for now this is not so much, because the total number of users of various Google services is in the hundreds of millions. But all the same, the growth of the dynamics of requests is obvious. Analysts also positively estimate the corporation’s provision of the ratio of the number of requests to the number of accounts affected by such a request. Indeed, in a single document submitted to a corporation by a government representative, several tens or hundreds of accounts may be affected. Google publishes all of this data.

As mentioned above, the government submits requests not only to provide access to user data, but also requests that one or another contact be deleted. Most deletion requests go to Gmail and YouTube. Interestingly, the ratio of the total number of requests to the number of requests satisfied by Google varies from country to country. So, the requests of the Chinese government remain unheard in most cases. But the requests of the UK police are usually carried out with 70% efficiency, so to speak.

The details of the report can be found at the link above, well, and you can see that the positive dynamics of growth in the number of requests is not surprising. The governments of some countries are beginning to better understand the network technologies and potential capabilities of the Network itself. The number of Internet users is also growing, and it is natural that law enforcement agencies are trying to learn more information about some people. Good or bad - the subject of a separate discussion.