Google Transparency Report getting more and more requests from governments around the world

Google Transparency Report getting more and more requests from governments around the world

Google has rolled out some new data on their Transparency Report and the company admitted that the new trends are disturbing.

The company said that even the western governments which are not known to be associated with censorship are asking for web data to be removed or censored.

Google said:

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. This is the fifth data set that we’ve released. And just like every other time before, we’ve been asked to take down political speech. It’s alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect—Western democracies not typically associated with censorship.

Google recently added data related to copyright infringement requests on this platform and it has all been very enlightening!