Google Transparency Report

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Google publikuje tzw. "Transparency Report" czyli statystykę tego ile razy musieli ujawnić dane użytkowników, lub ocenzurrować jakieś treści na wniosek administracji poszczególnych krajów (wymiaru sprawiedliwości, policji lub rządu).

Aktualne zestawienie można znaleźć tutaj: http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/governmentrequests/

Z ciekawych rzeczy dowiadujemy się np. że w obszarze Stany Zjednoczone w tym roku z YouTube usunięto co najmniej jeden film za "Government Criticism", a całkowita liczba nakazów usunięcia jakiś treści (najczęściej z Google Groups) zwiększyła się o 70% w porównaniu z rokiem ubiegłym.

Jeszcze artykuł z bardziej precyzyjną analizą, w tym obszaru brytyjskiego:

Cytat:

Google has reported a 71 per cent increase in UK government requests to remove items from its search and web services properties over the course of 2011.

The company's latest transparency report said that Google received 44 requests from the UK government over the first half of the year, the majority relating to YouTube, where police and other government groups asked for the removal of 220 videos.

The report revealed that 135 videos were taken down on the grounds of national security, and 61 over "privacy and security" complaints.

Privacy and security also led to the takedown of 67 Google image entries in the UK, along with 43 web search results and two Blogger entries.

The takedowns represent an increase over the second half of 2010, during which Google reported just 153 takedown requests. Overall numbers for 2010 were greatly skewed by a major government takedown in which more than 93,300 AdWords entries were taken offline.

In the US, Google received 757 takedown requests across its sites and services, up 70 per cent from the second half of last year. More than half were from Google Groups, where the company removed 379 pages deemed defamatory.

US authorities also called for the removal of 113 videos from YouTube, including several documenting alleged police brutality which Google refused to take down.

http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2120023/g.....ts-71-cent

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Google: Western governments increasingly indulge in online censorship

Governments not widely blamed for censorship are increasingly asking Google to remove political content from its services, the company said as it released its bi-annual transparency report.

The IT giant has been publishing data on how and why they have been asked by copyright holders and governmental agencies to remove user content since 2010. On Monday it released a new chunk of info on governments’ requests made from July to December 2011.

“This is the fifth data set that we’ve released. And just like every other time before, we’ve been asked to take down political speech. It’s alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect – Western democracies not typically associated with censorship,” Google Senior Policy Analyst Dorothy Chou said in the company’s blog.

For instance, the Spanish Data Protection Authority wanted Google to remove 270 search results that linked to blogs and sites referencing individuals and public figures as well as three blogs and three YouTube videos. Google did not comply.

Canada’s passport office asked Google to remove a YouTube video of a Canadian citizen urinating on his passport and flushing it down the toilet. Google did not comply.

The Polish Agency for Enterprise Development requested removal of a search result that criticized the agency, as well as eight more that linked to it. Google rejected the request.

A local US law enforcement agency wanted Google to take down 1,400 YouTube videos for alleged harassment. The company refused. A separate request from another agency asked to remove five user accounts over alleged harassment and threats. Google terminated four of them, removing approximately 300 videos, but left the remaining account intact.

Also in the US, a court ordered Google to remove 218 search results that linked to allegedly defamatory websites. The company removed a quarter of the cited results.

Pakistan wanted Google to remove videos satirizing the national military, which the company did not do.

Turkish authorities had Google restrict access to videos about the founder of modern Turkey Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Insulting him is a crime in the country.

Similarly, in Thailand Google had to block local users from viewing more than a hundred videos allegedly insulting the monarchy.

Bolivia, Jordan, the Czech Republic and Ukraine were noted in the report for asking Google to remove content for the first time.

The total number of governmental requests Google received jumped by 103 per cent over the six months, the company said. It complied with an average of 65 per cent of court orders, as opposed to 47 per cent of less formal requests.

http://www.rt.com/news/google-transparency-report-censorship-093/

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Bimi napisał:

The Polish Agency for Enterprise Development requested removal of a search result that criticized the agency, as well as eight more that linked to it. Google rejected the request.

Niezła jest historia z tym - czytajcie to: http://antyweb.pl/parp-o-cenurze-w-googl.....ac-strone/

Skrócona wersja poniżej.

Autor: Grzegorz Marczak, antyweb.pl

Zadzwoniłem do rzecznika PARP aby poprosić o komentarz. W pierwszych słowach usłyszałem, że to bzdura i Google podaje jakieś dziwne uzasadnienia. Następnie usłyszałem, że zadzwoni do mnie ktoś to się lepiej orientuje w temacie i faktycznie po kilku minutach odebrałem telefon z PARP.

Wersja wydarzeń PARP jest następująca. Wszystko rozchodzi się o stronę bioinfo.pl, która na siłę pozycjonowała się na takie hasła jak : Innowacyjnosc,barbara kurdycka, ministerstwo nauki, badania naukowe, Ministerstwo rozwoju regionalnego. Ponoć używali techniki Google boomb czyli (za wikipedia) spamowania wyszukiwarek internetowych linkami, tak aby określona witryna znalazła się na jak najwyższej pozycji wyszukiwań nie wiążących się bezpośrednio z jej zawartością.

PARP zgłosił do Google zapytanie czy mogą coś z tym zrobić ponieważ strona ta na siłę pozycjonuje się na wybrane hasła eksponując nieuzasadnioną krytykę działań PARP (firmy ponoć są w pośrednim sporze prawnym). Przy czym przedstawiciel PARP podkreślał, że nie bolała ich sama krytyka tylko ustawienie tego tekstu na siłę jako pierwszego na hasła takie jak innowacyjność itp.

Według PARP Google samo zaproponowało wypełnienie odpowiedniego formularza stwierdzając, że faktycznie wymieniona strona używa niedozwolonych technik pozycjonowania. Po zgłoszeniu sytuacja się poprawiła i bioinfo.pl przestało być widoczne na w/w hasła. No ale teraz PARP z zaskoczeniem dowiedział się, że próbowali cenzurować krytykę a Google im pomocy odmówiło.

[...]

Zadzwoniłem więc do BioInfoBank czyli właścicieli strony internetowej podanej przez PARP. I tutaj historia robi się jeszcze bardziej ciekawa. Przedstawiciel BioInfoBank wprawdzie twierdził, że nic mu nie jest wiadome na temat pozycjonowania ale 100% pewnością nie ma.

Nie był natomiast zdziwiony tym, że PARP wskazał na ich stronę i ich tekst gdyż nie dość, że są w sporze prawnym (nie bezpośrednio ale przez inne spółki które prowadzą) to PARP już raz pod koniec 2011 roku starał się zablokować ich stronę – jako uzasadnienie podając iż publikują informacje nie zgodne z prawdą.

Na pytanie czy po tym piśmie PARP próbował sądownie dochodzić swoich praw (skoro w dokumencie jest mowa o nieprawdziwych informacjach) mój rozmówca odpowiedział, że nic mu nie wiadomo na ten temat. Co wskazuje, że było to pismo straszak i dalszych kroków związanych z konkretnymi tekstami o agencji nie było.

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Google URL Takedown Requests Up 100% In a Month, Up 1137% On 2011

The massive wave of DMCA takedowns sent by rightsholders to Google in recent months is growing at an astonishing rate. During the past month the number of takedown requests received by the search giant doubled to almost 1.5 million URLs per week. To put that into perspective, exactly one year ago weekly URL takedowns numbered just 131,577 per week, an increase of 1,137%.

While many sites comply with DMCA-style takedown requests in order to maintain their ‘safe harbor’ status, sites such as The Pirate Bay routinely refuse to take anything down.

For a long time there was little that could be done to stop casual users from subsequently finding content on sites like TPB by using regular search engines such as Google. However, during the last couple of years a growing movement has sought to do just that, not just against sites like TPB, but against all domains, no matter what their copyright policies.

Although Google regularly posts takedown requests it receives to the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, the scale of the issue had largely been hidden. That changed with the publication of the company’s Transparency Report earlier this year.

What that continually updated database shows today is a huge and increasing effort by rightsholders to have links to copyright content hidden from the prying eyes of Google searchers on a scale never seen before.

Last month we reported that Google had just received a record number of URL takedown requests in a seven day period. In the week starting July 9, Google was asked to take down 719,416 URLs, up from the previous weekly record of 609,800 set in June.

Following that article the bar was raised again during the week starting July 17. A total of 736,477 URLs were taken down, but two weeks later another huge batch would eclipse even this record.

In the week starting July 23, rightsholders asked for 1,107,659 URLs to be taken down, an increase of more than 50% on the previous weekly record. But amazingly even this record was about to be smashed.

During the week starting August 13, Google received takedown requests for 1,496,220 URLs, up 35% on the record set just two weeks earlier and a huge 1,137% increase over the 131,577 URL takedowns requested August 8 2011.

Google says that during the last four weeks it was asked by 1,825 copyright owners and 1,406 anti-piracy reporting organizations to remove 5,733,402 URLs across 32,545 domains, truly huge numbers which on recent trends look likely to increase.

czytaj dalej: http://torrentfreak.com/google-url-taked.....11-120824/

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Google Starts Reporting False DMCA Takedown Requests

Google has quietly rolled out a new feature to its copyright transparency report, allowing the public to see when DMCA takedown notices sent by copyright holders are false. The search giant is currently processing more than a dozen million “infringing” links per month, but points out that not all requests sent by rightsholders are legitimate. As an example, Google cites a request where a major U.S. motion picture studio asked them to censor their IMDb page and official trailer.

Ever since Google started publishing a transparency report for the DMCA requests it receives, the number of notices being sent have shot through the roof.

During the past month copyright holders asked Google to remove 12,045,130 webpages from its search. Unfortunately, however, not all of these requests are legitimate.

In some cases the notices are flagged as false because the content has already been removed from the original site. But the automated systems used by copyright holders also include perfectly legitimate content as we’ve highlighted in the past.

This hasn’t gone unnoticed by Google either.

“A major U.S. motion picture studio requested removal of the IMDb page for a movie released by the studio, as well as the official trailer posted on a major authorized online media service,’ they write in their FAQ.

Google doesn’t give any names, but they’re referring to Warner Brothers.

Naturally, Google doesn’t remove any of the links they find to be non-infringing. And to give the public insight into how often these false notices occur the search giant has updated its transparency report to include this data.

As of this week Google is specifying how many, and which URLs they keep up.

For a DMCA request sent by Microsoft, 3% of the reported webpages were not removed. This notice “falsely” requested Google to censor AMC Theatres, BBC, Buzzfeed, CNN, HuffPo, TechCrunch, RealClearPolitics, Rotten Tomatoes, ScienceDirect, Washington Post, Wikipedia and even the U.S. Government.

These false takedowns are now clearly specified as “no action taken” and the full URLs are shown in the report.

dalej: http://torrentfreak.com/google-starts-re.....ts-121213/

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Google Releases Transparency Report Showing US Surveillance Requests Up 33% in the Last Year
Two Out of Every Three US Demands to Google Come Without A Warrant

This morning, Google released their semi-annual transparency report, and once again, it revealed a troubling trend: Internet surveillance around the world continues to rise, with the United States leading the way in demands for user data.

Google received over 21,000 requests for data on over 33,000 users in the last six months from governments around the world, a 70% increase since Google started releasing numbers in 2010. The United States accounted for almost 40% the total requests (8,438) and the number of users (14,791). The total numbers in the US for 2012 amounted to a 33% increase from 2011. And while Google only complied with two-thirds of the total requests globally, they complied with 88% of the requests in the United States.

Admirably, Google expanded their transparency report this time around, providing more detailed information about what kind of requests they get from the US government-specifically the type of requests they get under the main email privacy law in the US, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA).

EFF has long criticized ECPA for not providing email with the same warrant protection as the Fourth Amendment gives to physical letters and phone calls. The Justice Department believes that it doesn´t need a warrant for emails over 180 days. Google´s lawyers, to their credit, have criticized the law as well, saying just this week, "our view is that [ECPA] is out of compliance with the Fourth Amendment because the government can call for the production of your data without a search warrant."

The most troubling aspect of the transparency report shows a vast majority-about two-thirds-of US government requests for user data were by subpoena, which has a much lower threshold than warrants and do not even require a judge´s approval. Only 1896 of the requests also came with a probable cause warrant, and 5784 of them came with no preliminary oversight from a judge at all.

czytal dalej: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/01/go.....-last-year

Google reports record requests for private info

Google received a record number of requests to disclose user information to governments and law enforcement bodies in 2012. Requests have rocketed by 25 per cent in the last year, with the US leading the field by far in calls for data disclosure.

The search giant published its findings in its annual transparency report, detailing the number of requests for user information by country. Since Google began documenting figures in 2009, there has been an increase of over 70 per cent in disclosure requests. The company says it has complied with 66 per cent of recent cases.

National governments and law enforcement agencies made 42,327 requests for personal data in 2012, a drastic increase from the 34,001 requests in 2011.

The US comprised the most submissions for private information, with over 8,438 requests in the latter half of 2012, a large portion of which were made through subpoenas. Google granted 88 per cent of these requests, the lowest since the search giant began reporting the figures.

None of the other countries in the report even came close the US total, but India came in second, reporting a total of 2,431 in the latter half of 2012, followed by 1,693 from France.

The UK also saw a significant number of requests, 70 per cent of which were granted by the company in 2012.

czytaj dalej: http://rt.com/news/google-information-requests-report-625/

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Google Says the FBI Is Secretly Spying on Some of Its Customers

The terrorists apparently would win if Google told you the exact number of times the Federal Bureau of Investigation invoked a secret process to extract data about the media giant’s customers.

That’s why it is unlawful for any record-keeper to disclose it has received a so-called National Security Letter. But under a deal brokered with the President Barack Obama administration, Google on Tuesday published a “range” of times it received National Security Letters demanding it divulge account information to the authorities without warrants.

It was the first time a company has ever released data chronicling the volume of National Security Letter requests.

National Security Letters allow the government to get detailed information on Americans’ finances and communications without oversight from a judge. The FBI has issued hundreds of thousands of NSLs and has even been reprimanded for abusing them. The NSLs are written demands from the FBI that compel internet service providers, credit companies, financial institutions and businesses like Google to hand over confidential records about their customers, such as subscriber information, phone numbers and e-mail addresses, websites visited and more as long as the FBI says the information is “relevant” to an investigation.

In each year from 2009 to 2012, Google said it received "0-999" National Security Letters.

dalej: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/03/google-nsl-range/

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Windows open: Microsoft reveals tens of thousands of users data disclosed

Microsoft received 75,378 government requests in 2012 to disclose user information, a report reveals. The company joins the likes of Google, which handed over troves of user data to governments last year, raising concerns over privacy violations.

The software giant claims the requests come from the FBI and as such the disclosure of the information can be justified.

Microsoft revealed in its transparency report it had disclosed data pertaining to 137,424 user accounts at the behest of world governments. Microsoft maintains that actual “customer content” was released in only 2.1 per cent of cases.

However, names, email addresses, user names and locations, which the company classifies as ‘non-content’, were released in 79.8 per cent of cases.

Most of the requests to reveal user information over the past year originated in the US, UK, Turkey, Germany and France.

“However, we only disclose data in 46 countries where we have the ability to validate the lawfulness of the request,” said a company spokesperson.

dalej: http://rt.com/news/microsoft-discloses-customer-information-659/

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Google Says It Has A First Amendment Right To Release NSA Data Request Numbers

For the past two weeks, Google has been petitioning the government to allow it to publish the exact number of data requests it receives from the NSA. There’s not been a lot of progress made on that front, but now Google is pulling out the big guns in attempt to force transparency.

In a recent filing, obtained by The Washington Post, before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, Google argues the gag order that prevents it from publishing the number of data requests it receives is unconstitutional. In particular, Google says that such gag orders violate its First Amendment rights:

“Google seeks a declaratory judgment that Google has a right under the First Amendment to publish, and that no applicable law or regulation prohibits Google from publishing, two aggregate unclassified numbers: (1) the total number of FISA requests it receives, if any; and (2) the total number of users or accounts encompassed within such requests.”

Now, why is this so difficult? What´s wrong with publishing nothing but numbers? Well, it may seem kind of silly to you, but the government argues that even publishing the exact number of data requests it sends would put the nation in danger. Google isn't asking to publish any specific requests nor it it asking to reveal inner workings of its relationship with the NSA. Google is only asking to publish some numbers, and that has thus far proven to be incredibly difficult.

dalej: http://www.webpronews.com/google-says-it.....rs-2013-06