Google Updates Its Biannual Government Transparency Report

Google today updated its biannual Transparency Report that aims to provide greater transparency around the government requests for user data or the removal of content from the company’s servers. While this new report does not greatly diverge from earlier ones, the company did add one new data point: the number of user accounts that are specified in the requests the company receives.

As Google notes, this new data should help researchers and developers to “revisualize it in different ways, or mash it up with information from other organizations to test and draw up new hypotheses about government behaviors online.”

The self-governing parliamentary Cook Islands in the South Pacific made their debut this year. As Google only received fewer than ten request from the former British protectorate, it won’t release any data about the nature of these requests.

As for the U.S., Google specifically notes that it did not comply with a number of requests that would have resulted in the deletion of videos that were allegedly portraying police violence. With regard to China, Google also notes that it received three requests to remove a total of 121 items from its services. Two involved AdWords and Google complied with those, but the company notes that it has “withheld details about one request because [it has] reason to believe that the Chinese government has prohibited [it] from full disclosure.”

You can find the full report here.