Google Fights Censorship with Transparency Report

Google has launched Transparency Report, a set of tools — including an interactive map — that shows which governments have asked for information about users or requested Google to censor or take down content in a certain time frame.

The map shows, for example, that in the period from January 2010 to June 2010, the United States government asked Google about user info on 4,287 occasions, and asked it to remove content on 128 occasions. Other countries that have put in a lot of such requests (more than 1,000) during this time frame are Brazil, France, India and the United Kingdom.

If you click on a marker of an individual country on the map, you can also see how many removal requests were fully or partially complied with, as well as which Google services were affected. For example, in the period from July 2009 to December 2009, there were seven U.S. court orders to remove content from YouTube, and six court orders to remove content from Blogger.

On the same site, Google also offers an interactive traffic graph to Google services around the world. Whenever you see an outage, Google explains, you see “disruptions in the free flow of information, whether it’s a government blocking information or a cable being cut.”

It’s a very interesting effort from Google, and one that may even be contested by some governments (Update: China is not included in the Report. Google explains: “Chinese officials consider censorship demands as state secrets, so we cannot disclose that information at this time“). With it, Google is essentially saying that yes, it will take down or censor content if a government requests it, but it will also inform the users every time it happens. The tool will definitely help activists and human rights groups create studies about the obstruction of the flow of information and censorship, and it may even make governments reign in their requests for censorship and user info.

Update: digging through Transparency Report’s FAQ, we revealed several important tidbits of information about the project.

The data is not comprehensive or fully accurate. From the FAQ:

“…we have not included statistics for countries where we’ve received fewer than 30 requests for user data in criminal cases during the 6-month period. Where the numbers of requests are relatively low from a particular country, revealing the statistics could place important investigations at risk and interfere with public safety efforts of the authorities. For content removals requested by government agencies, we haven’t released specific numbers for those countries in which we received fewer than 10 requests. Many of those one-off requests may coincide with our own content policies, so when the numbers get small enough, they don’t necessarily reflect anything about the level of censorship in that country. Similarly, if a governmental agency used a web form to demand removal of content, we generally have no way of including those reports in our statistics.”

Also, Google recognizes that the information provided by these tools is far from complete, but plans to improve things in the future.

“We would like to be able to share more information, including how many times we disclosed data in response to these requests, but it’s not an easy matter. The requests we receive for user data come from a variety of government agencies with different legal authorities and different forms of requests. They don’t follow a standard format or necessarily seek the same kinds of information. … Given all this complexity, it’s a difficult task to categorize and quantify these requests in a way that adds meaningful transparency, but we plan to in the future.“

[via mashable]

Posted in: Google