The snoopiest govts according to Google: USA is #1

google.com

2 points·erickhill··5 comments

The USA makes one request per 66726 citizens. France makes one per 61328.6 citizens, Australia one per 63405.5, and the United Kingdom is at one per 54216.9 (The best estimate I found for the population was 63 million; using the figure from census data in 2001, it's one per 50593.1). The absolute number of requests does not give much useful information except when you also take into account the relative populations of countries; using requests per citizens as a metric, the USA is in no way the "snoopiest govt".

Edit: While I haven't gone through these really systematically, I think that Mexico might have the lowest ratio, at one request per 3159742 citizens.

Per citizens online is probably a better metric. Then I'd guess that Canada will be close to lowest.

Note also that Switzerland apparently made no requests in this time period, so I assume will be lowest, and I guess there are countries who have legal jurisdiction over some part of Google but have never filed a request.

Canada has one per 887892 citizens, so Mexico is still lower (I would rather live in Canada than Mexico, though). Of course countries which don't make any requests would be lower still, but I neglected those as it would cause divide-by-zero errors (I've just been dividing the population of the country by the number of requests).

Exactly...that is the same thought I had initially when viewing the data...when viewed on a per capita basis it becomes something else...not that I doubt the US is not the worst.

I see that several countries have fewer than half of their requests honoured at all or in part, with Hungary and Turkey having a grand total of zero requests being accommodated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com