Google Reveals Which Governments Request the Most Data on Their Citizens

Google has updated its Transparency Report to include data from the first six months of the year. Last year, Google started revealing how many data requests it received from governments around the world.

The idea was to make the whole thing a bit more transparent, even though the company has to comply with the laws of various countries it operates in.

Every six months or so it updates the data enabling those interested to keep track of trends.

The latest report adds an interesting new metric, it also includes the number of users affected by the data requests, not just how many requests it had received, a much more relevant number.

Google is also making the data available to anyone interested in using it along side other info or for further analysis.

"All too often, policy that affects how information flows on the Internet is created in the absence of empirical data," Dorothy Chou, Senior Policy Analyst at Google, wrote.

"But by showing traffic patterns and disruptions to our services, and by sharing how many government requests for content removal and user data we receive from around the world, we hope to offer up some metrics to contribute to a public conversation about the laws that influence how people communicate online," she said.

"Today we’re updating the Government Requests tool with numbers for requests that we received from January to June 2011," she announced.

With that, here are some of the more interesting stats in the new data. The US once again leads the way in the total number of request, but Brazil is the top country when it comes to removal requests.

There were 5959 data requests coming from the US affecting 11,057 people. Google complied with 93 percent of them. There were only 92 data removal requests, concerning 757 items, and Google complied with 63 percent of them.