Communications of the ACM
Google Says Government Surveillance Growing
Google headquarters, Mountain View, CA.
Patrick Tehan / Mercury News
Government surveillance is on the rise, according to the most recent Google Transparency Report.
Governments also want more data about Google users and want more content posted by Google users removed. "Government demands for user data have increased steadily since we first launched the Transparency Report," notes Google's Dorothy Chou.
In the first six months of 2012, there were nearly 21,000 inquiries from government organizations for information about more than 34,000 Google-related accounts. However, Google has a long history of pushing back against governmental demands for data, going back at least to its refusal to turn over search data to the U.S. Department of Justice in 2005.
The United States is the most active country in terms of making requests for user data, with nearly 8,000 in the first half of 2012, according to the report. Google complied with 90 percent of the requests, while Google's average overall compliance rate for the 31 countries listed in the report is about 47 percent.
Chou notes that in the past year companies such as Dropbox, LinkedIn, Sonic.net, and Twitter started publicizing government information in order to inform the dialogue about Internet freedom and its constraints.
From InformationWeek
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Abstracts Copyright © 2012 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
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