UK is making more Google takedown requests

THE UK COALITION GOVERNMENT is steadily increasing the number of takedown requests that it makes to internet search engine Google, and in the last year made 71 per cent more than before.

The news should not surprise anyone. It pushed the Digital Economy Act through Parliament in unseemly haste and leaps at any opportunity to peek at or shut down internet and mobile communications.

Google's Transparency report is released to show how many government requests for content removal and user data it receives. In a blog post the firm said that it hoped that by showing the number of requests it got it would start a debate on the laws that cover online communications.

"By showing traffic patterns and disruptions to our services, and by sharing how many government requests for content removal and user data we receive from around the world, we hope to offer up some metrics to contribute to a public conversation about the laws that influence how people communicate online," wrote Dorothy Chou, senior policy analyst at Google.

"We believe that providing this level of detail highlights the need to modernise laws like the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which regulates government access to user information and was written 25 years ago - long before the average person had ever heard of email."

In the UK takedown requests were up by 71 per cent, and Google said that it had received 65 UK Government requests for removal of content and 333 for removal of information from Google services and had complied with around 80 per cent of them.

Items that the Government wanted to remove included around 60 pictures that were tagged and Youtube videos for a variety of reasons, including "national security". One takedown request was aimed at Google's mapping services for a reason cited only as "defamatory".

The most requests were made on Youtube videos, although Blogger posts were also targeted by the UK Government, and Google complied with around 200 out of 230 requests.

Court orders were used rather sparingly, and the report shows that Google responded to twelve of these. µ