Along with other tech companies, Google regularly posts Transparency Reports detailing government requests for user data and content removals. Since 2010, the report has expanded in scope and coverage, but Google is today updating the design to make it more accessible.
Google this evening released the latest version of its Transparency Report in which it offers up more information regarding emergency disclosure requests and preservation requests. Regarding emergency disclosure requests, Google says it is now reporting requests from governments in every country. Previously, Google only reported requests from the United States.
Google released the latest version of its Transparency Report today, revealing data about government requests the company received between June and December of 2013. According to the report, Google received 3,105 requests to remove 14,637 pieces of content within that time period, which brings the total number of requests received by the Mountain View corporation up to 6,591 for the entirety of 2013, a figure that’s about 60% higher than the previous calendar year.
Google wants you to know exactly how much email you send and receive is encrypted during transit, so today it launched a new section in its Transparency Report that does exactly that:
When you mail a letter to your friend, you hope she’ll be the only person who reads it. But a lot could happen to that letter on its way from you to her, and prying eyes might try to take a look. That’s why we send important messages in sealed envelopes, rather than on postcards… Email works in a similar way. Emails that are encrypted as they’re routed from sender to receiver are like sealed envelopes, and less vulnerable to snooping—whether by bad actors or through government surveillance—than postcards.
Google notes that Gmail has always used encryption in transit using Transport Layer Security (TLS), but that doesn’t do much if the email client on the other end isn’t doing the same. Around 40 to 50 percent of emails between Gmail and others aren’t encrypted, according to Google, and it provided the following chart of what services are using encryption:
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Google’s latest Transparency Report reveals that the company is flagging 10,000 websites a day as unsafe due to phishing and malware, with around a billion people protected.
So in 2006 we started a Safe Browsing programto find and flag suspect websites. This means that when you are surfing the web, we can now warn you when a site is unsafe. We’re currently flagging up to 10,000 sites a day—and because we share this technology with other browsers there are about 1 billion users we can help keep safe …
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Google is out today with its latest Transparency Report where the company officially reports the number of requests it receives from government organizations to remove or hand over data. Today’s update to the report includes data for government requests from January 2012 to June 2012 and shows requests for access to user data have steadily increased.
For the United States, Google received 7,969 requests during the time period, of which 16,281 user accounts were specified. Google also explained that it sometimes received “falsified court orders asking us to remove content.”
This is the sixth time we’ve released this data, and one trend has become clear: Government surveillance is on the rise. As you can see from the graph below, government demands for user data have increased steadily since we first launched the Transparency Report. In the first half of 2012, there were 20,938 inquiries from government entities around the world. Those requests were for information about 34,614 accounts.
The report showed that requests around the world for the removal of content also continued to increase:
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Google just introduced a new online course for those interesting in “power searching” with its search engine.
The free course offers:
“Google Search makes it amazingly easy to find information. Come learn about the powerful advanced tools we provide to help you find just the right information when the stakes are high,” explained Google Senior Research Scientist Daniel Russell on the registration page.
Course registration opens today and closes July 16, but the first class starts July 10. New classes begin Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and all course-related activities end July 23.
Check out the schedule below:
For more information about becoming a “great Internet searcher,” visit the course page at Google Insights.
As noted in a recent post on the Official Google Blog, Google recently made changes to the Transparency Report that launched a couple of years ago to report data on “government requests.” The interactive reports, which are available here, already included user data requests from courts and government agencies, real-time and historical traffic from various Google services worldwide, and removal requests from both governments and copyright owners. Google is adding data related to government requests today for user information and the removal of blogs posts and videos made from July 2011 to December 2011:
Today we’re releasing data showing government requests to remove blog posts or videos or hand over user information made from July to December 2011… Unfortunately, what we’ve seen over the past couple years has been troubling, and today is no different. When we started releasing this data in 2010, we also added annotations with some of the more interesting stories behind the numbers. We noticed that government agencies from different countries would sometimes ask us to remove political content that our users had posted on our services. We hoped this was an aberration. But now we know it’s not… For the six months of data we’re releasing today, we complied with an average of 65% of court orders, as opposed to 47% of more informal requests.
An example of some of the requests is outlined by Google’s Senior Policy Analyst Dorothy Chou:
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