Google: Government surveillance on the rise

Is your government watching you via the Internet? According to Google’s recent Transparency Report, requests for access to Google data by governments the world over have spiked in the first half of the year. Google says 21,000 requests were made from January to July 2012. Of that figure, almost a third came from the US government which filed 7,969 requests. India (2319), Brazil (1566), France (1546), Germany (1533) and the UK (1425) round off the top 6. The Philippines was not on the list. Google says it did not include statistics from countries that filed less than 30 requests for user data in criminal cases during the reporting period. It did note however that from January to June 2012 Google received a “request from the office of a local mayor to remove five blogs for criticizing the mayor”. Google says it did not remove the content in response to the request.  Turkey topped the in terms of non-court related take down requests, the US had the most court related take down requests.

Read Rappler’s story here.
Read Google’s transparency report here.
See statistics for the Philippines here.
Read Google’s blog entry on government requests here.