David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer at Google, announced the release of a new Government Requests tool this week. The tool will provide users with information about the number of requests for user data or content removal that Google receives from government agencies around the world. This initial launch only includes data from July – December 2009, but they plan to continue updating the data in six month increments.
Mr Drummond stated that “we notify users about requests that may affect them personally. If we remove content in search results, we display a message to users. The numbers we are sharing today take this transparency a step further and reflect the total number of requests we have received broken down by jurisdiction. We are also sharing the number of these content removal requests that we do not comply with, and while we cannot yet provide more detail about our compliance with user data requests in a useful way, we intend to do so in the future.”
This release is part of Google’s commitment to principles and practices that govern privacy and free expression. The tool is intended to provide users with an idea of the nature and scale of government requests for “censorship and data around the globe.”
