Google Publishes Censorship Map

Entropy98 writes "Google has released a censorship map showing how often countries around the world request user information and censor services such as Youtube. The US government asked Google for user information 4,287 times during the first six months of 2010. Information on China is conspicuously absent."

My first thoughts

[Ishkibble]

My first thoughts are 'this is great'. Google claims "don't be evil" so it better live up to it. Money corrupts a corporation and since they have gone public that has been called into question. I have an android phone and i happily let Google track me, i let them keep my email, my photos, my digital life, the least they can do is put out something like this. This map is not for me though, its for the average Googler who doesn't fully understand how Google collects and keeps and uses personal data.

Where are the percentages?

[CannonballHead]

They give the map with actual numbers, apparently, right?

I'd be more interested in what percentage of data that Google COULD get asked about is actually asked about.

Otherwise, it's like saying that I killed 300 cows whereas my neighbor only killed 1. Well, it just so happens that my herd is 300x as big, too... a more understandable reading would be the percentage of cows killed per herd.

Re:Dupe

[commodore64_love]

>>>United States
>>>4287 data requests

I'd like to see this same information broken-down State-by-State, so we can see which states are most censoring. I'm betting New York and California and Pennsylvania are near the top, given their previous activities.

As for China, I wonder how long it will be until someplace like Australia or Canada decide "Hey that's a good idea" and declare takedown request to be state secrets.

What happened on Feb 25 2010 ?

[equex]

Look at the Traffic chart ( http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/traffic/ [google.com] ) Seems to be a huge peak and after that general activity falls quite a bit compared to before that date ?

State Secrets

[hondo77]

"Chinese officials consider censorship demands to be state secrets so we cannot disclose that information at this time," said Google.

Somewhere in Washington, D.C. or nearby Virginia, someone in a cubicle just said, "Ooh, good idea!"

Re:Dupe

[grub]

As for China, I wonder how long it will be until someplace like Australia or Canada decide "Hey that's a good idea" and declare takedown request to be state secrets.

I checked the map, interesting Canada has less than 10 (!)

World of difference the border between the US and Canada makes.

Re:Biggest democracies, biggest culprits

[h00manist]

Not all of them
Canada ............. 10

Re:Dupe

[shutdown -p now]

At least in cases of some NSLs that we became aware of, NSL stated that even disclosing its existence is illegal. Disclosing the number of NSLs served would, quite obviously, disclose their existence.

I also recall reading that some organizations in US have taken the approach of regularly posting something like "no NSLs have been served this months". This way, if one month they don't post anything, you know what happened.