Government Requests to Google

Ever tried to watch your favorite YouTube video, only to find out that it is no longer available? Did you even know that law enforcement and government agencies can request that information be removed from Google servers?

Google on Tuesday launched its Government Requests feature, an interactive tool that breaks down by country the requests for user data and information removal between July 1, 2009 and December 31, 2009. The idea is to build transparency, as there's a fine line between openness and privacy protection, according to the company. A lot of requests are legitimate--child pornography, for example--but the public has limited access to these processes, they said.

Brazil tops the number of takedown requests at 291, while the United States came in fourth at 123. U.S. data requests numbered 3580. According to Google, the data will be updated in six-month increments.

From David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer and senior vice president of corporate development, on the company's blog:

We already try to be as transparent as legally possible with respect to requests. Whenever we can, 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.