"It's alarming not only
because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests
come from countries you might not suspect -- Western democracies not
typically associated with censorship," Dorothy Chou, a senior policy
analyst at Google, wrote in a blog post on Sunday night.
"For example, in the
second half of last year, 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."
In the last half of 2011,
U.S. agencies asked Google to remove 6,192 individual pieces of content
from its search results, blog posts or archives of online videos,
according to the report. That's up 718% compared with the 757 such items
that U.S. agencies asked Google to remove in the six months prior.
Overall, Google received
187 requests from United States law enforcement agencies and courts to
remove content from its Web properties from July to December, up 103%
from the 92 requests the
Mountain View, California, company received in
the previous reporting period.
In one incident cited in
the report, a U.S. law enforcement agency asked Google to take down a
blog that "allegedly defamed a law enforcement official in a personal
capacity." The company did not comply with that request.
In another, a separate
law enforcement group asked Google to take down 1,400 YouTube videos
(Google owns YouTube) because of "alleged harassment."
And in Canada, the
passport office asked Google to delete a YouTube video "of a Canadian
citizen urinating on his passport and flushing it down the toilet,"
according to the report.
The tech company did not
oblige either of those requests but did comply at least in part with 42%
of the removal requests from the United States in the last half of
2011, the report says.
That number is down considerably compared to previous reports; In the
latter half of 2010, for example, Google said it complied with 87% of
U.S. requests to remove content.
The biannual
transparency report, which includes data to July 2009, also indicates a
rise in world governments' requests to take a look at the data Google
collects about its users. And with those requests, Google tended to be
much more likely to comply.
In the last half of
2011, Google received 6,321 requests for user data from government
agencies in the United States and complied at least in part with 93% of
them, according to data released in the report.
Those requests for
information about Google users come as part of criminal investigations,
Google says, and are not unique to the company.
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