Google is receiving more government requests for access to user data than ever before
Transparency reports from the big tech companies always make for interesting reading, and the latest update from Google is no different. Its most recent transparency report covers the period July-August 2015, and shows that the company received a record number of government data requests.
The report shows the number of times governments around the world contacted Google with requests for access to user data. For anyone with an interest in either privacy or security, the marked increase in the number of requests is interesting.
At the top of the league -- predictably -- is the US, and Google bowed to pressure in 79 percent of cases. In all, Google received 12,523 requests for data affecting 27,157 users. In second place is Germany which put in 7,491 requests in H2 2015, up dramatically from 3,903 in the first half of the year. Third comes France with 4,174 requests (up from 3,489), followed by the UK with 3,497 (up from 3,146), and the top five is rounded off by India with 3,265 (up from 3,087).
In a blog post that accompanies the publishing of the Transparency Report, Google's Legal Director for Law Enforcement and Information Security, Richard Salgado, says:
We’re pleased with some of the improvements we’ve seen in surveillance laws. The European Commission and the United States recently agreed on the Privacy Shield agreement, which includes new undertakings covering procedural protections for surveillance efforts. Earlier this year, President Obama signed the Judicial Redress Act into law, which Google strongly supported. The law creates a process for extending procedural protections under the Privacy Act of 1974 to non-U.S. persons. This shift helps address concerns about the ability of non-U.S. persons to redress grievances concerning data collected and stored by the U.S. government under U.S. law. Indeed, the distinctions that U.S. privacy and surveillance laws make between U.S. and non-U.S. persons are increasingly obsolete in a world where communications primarily take place over a global medium: the Internet.
The full Transparency Report is available to read on Google's dedicated site.
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