Google Transparency Report – requests from government agencies for user data | Hacker News Reader

Google Transparency Report – requests from government agencies for user data

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38 pointsceekays20 comments

Interesting how requests from Russia, Turkey and Hungary are consistently ignored, how China is not on the list, and how Brazil's requests have very high compliance rate (similar to the U.S.)

I wonder why Austria isn't listed, while both Swiss and Germany have a lot of requests.

The part I find interesting is the ratio of user accounts specified to # of requests. E.g. the United States made ~8k requests for ~16k user accounts.

It also has a 90% compliance rate, higher than the rest. In the previous months it reaches 93 and 94%.

In complying, what kind of data does google provide?

According to this, "URLs requested to be removed from Search per week" has increased 10-fold over the past six months.

http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/

Does this mean that my govt. can read all of my mails if they want to? Am I missing something?

Why is no one complaining?

Isn't there an email service which has 0% compliance? I would shift to that, now!

Call the Privacy Commissioner/Ministry of your country.

Wow Canada has a similar population and political system as Australia but we only had 50 vs Australia's 523.

What's going on there?

Canada has the Bell (telephone) and Rogers (cable) duopoly. In addition, both of them offer internet service and cellular data service. Odds are, if the Canadian government (agencies and governments underneath the Canadian federal government or any of the provincial governments and their subordinate agencies) ever did need information about anyone they could call one of these two companies first.

Note: I am not at all sure if Canadian laws allow for this kind of thing, and I am not all accusing either company or any of their competitors of being party to such a request. I'm merely indicating that because of the market dominance of two very large telecommunication companies who practically own the cables underground, the airwaves above, and reasonable number of media outlets in Canada between them, the number of requests an entity would need to make to gather information about someone is pretty small. I would not be surprised if the order of requests for information went something like: call Rogers and get any info, call Bell and get any info, call Google and get any info.

Edit: added "In addition,"

Good point, subpoena to a domestic company deeply connected to the government would be easier than targeting Google. I'm not sure what Australia's telecom situation is, but I'd imagine that would also be the case.

ISP doesn't have a year of gmail account content.

Probably just easier to hack the accounts.

Is this obtained only with a subpoena or with a warrant?

This just represents requests, rather than actual fulfillments or valid requests.

It does show the compliance rate of the request which I think is really high in some countries considering Google may not have been legally obligated to comply.

I wonder what kind and what amount of data is released. There's a range from the IP address that created, say, a YouTube video to an accounts entire GMail history to the entire Google profile associated with that account, including visited web pages as learned from ad networks etc. Not sure if they even store the latter in a way that could be part of a targeted request.

A breakdown by product would be a start.

On a sidenote that page has been available forever, it's not a new thing.

India has defended her 2nd position consistently. Wonder what percentage of it was demanded by political parties (especially the ruling ones) out of their vested interests.

Although India is listed second by number of requests, in terms of (unique) requests per capita, it comes near the bottom of the pile.

Similarly, Brazil comes in third, but is fairly average (amongst the countries listed) in terms of requests per capita.

The United States leads by a long way, then Australia, France, the United Kingdom, and Hong Kong.

No, I was just concerned about bare number. Hope this clears.

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