Google recently announced on its official blog that it was releasing a new Government Request tool using Google Maps to list requests received by Google from governments wanting data or content removal.

Surprisingly, the United States ranked 2nd in the number of data requests made to Google (3580). The United States came in 4th for the number of requests for content removal (123), with roughly half of the requests to remove content from YouTube. The first place ranking country in both categories was Brazil. I was taken aback that countries like the United States and the United Kingdom would rank so highly. Google does say that most of these requests come from law enforcement agencies conducting criminal investigations. I wonder whether the United States ranks so highly simply because it has more employees with the expertise in cybercrime to initiate these requests. Nonetheless, it is not a secret that the United States uses private data sources to do data mining on its citizens. Still, I would have expected countries with active resistance movements like Burma or authoritarian regimes like Saudi Arabia to be closer to the top of these lists.

I first looked at this list to find China's ranking. Interestingly, China is not included in this list. Where there would be an entry for China, there is a question mark and the comment "Chinese officials consider censorship demands as state secrets, so we can not disclose that information at this time." There are many countries, including most of the Middle East, that are not included in this list, but China is the only country that is actually excluded. I do not think that it is a coincidence that this new Google tool was released just after the controversy began over Google's decision to defer to the demands of Chinese authorities to censor Google search results. I think that this is Google's attempt to distance itself from the policies of the Chinese government and to be upfront about its dealings with all the governments of the world. I appreciate their statement in support of free expression and rights of privacy, with the release of this new tool. I will be curious to see how it evolves.