Government Asks Google To Hand Over Record Amount Of Users’ Personal Info

The latest edition of Google’s Transparency Report, which tracks government requests for access to data, revealed that in the second half of 2015 Australian government agencies made 1258 requests for user data. In the report, we see that the number of government requests has been rising as time goes on, crossing the 40,000 threshold for the first time since Google began offering these reports. The report features a breakdown of the amount of data requests made by different countries to Google and YouTube, as well as how many users or accounts would be affected and how often company officials agreed to provide data. In the second half of 2010, the company provided data for 76 percent of requests, but it’s held steady at around 64 percent since 2012. Among those cases, Google complied with the requests – though not necessarily in their entirety – 79 percent of the time. The greatest number of requests came from the US government, followed by Germany, France, the UK, India, Singapore and Australia. Google has set a precedent, prompting other data collectors and tech conglomerates, like Facebook and Twitter, to regularly release similar reports.

The company then sent an open letter to the US Attorney General and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, asking the government for permission to publicize the number and scope of national security requests in an effort to protect its own claims of transparency. The ranges from this last transparency report match the previous one, and show a continued fall in NSLs from their highs in 2013 and 2014. “However, government nondisclosure obligations regarding the number of FISA national security requests that Google receives, as well as the number of accounts covered by those requests, fuel that speculation”.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an global non-profit digital rights organization, publishes a report on which Internet entities do the best at protecting subscriber data.

It looks like the government is getting increasingly data-hungry. All three countries were the target of an assortment of terrorist attacks in the latter half of 2015, and based on how the year is going so far, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect the number of requests to increase yet again for the first half of 2016. That number is up from 12,022 requests in the first half of 2015.

“This is Google’s fifth year in the report, and it has adopted some of the policies we are highlighting, including the best practices from prior reports”, the EFF stated in its Who Has Your Back? Microsoft outright rejected 13.9% of the requests for information. This should vary from evidence to solve cases, data on a terrorist’s accounts and so on.