In its latest transparency report, Google showed that in spite of governments’ increased requests for information on citizens, the company is actually turning over less user data than ever before.

As the stats show, the past 12 months saw around 21,000 requests from government agencies, including judges and police, for Google-held data on users between July and December of 2012. That figure was around 12,000 for the same period in 2009.

However, the company is complying with a smaller percentage of those requests. In 2009, it turned over user data for around 76 percent of requests; last year, that number dipped to 66 percent, an all-time low.

Google reps say the increase in requests has a lot to do with the overall increase in Google’s reach and scope. More people around the world are using more Google services — Gmail, YouTube, web search, Google+ — to do more things than they were in 2009.

For most of the fulfilled requests, around 68 percent of them, Google produced user data in response to a subpoena. In a further 22 percent of cases, Google received a search warrant from a judge. The remainder, a Google rep stated in a blog post on the report, were “mostly court orders.”

Google turned over information in 88 percent of U.S. requests — that’s the highest percentage for any country’s government. Other governments, such as Turkey and Russia, saw compliance in single-digit percentages or no compliance at all.

Here’s a country-by-country graph we made for ya:

Top image courtesy of Shutterstock.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Carrier IQ has responded to speculation that it’s turning over your mobile data to law enforcement with an interesting rebuttal.

In an email to VentureBeat, a company spokesperson wrote, “Just to clarify all of the media frenzy around the FBI, Carrier IQ has never provided any data to the FBI.”

Carrier IQ is a company that monitors mobile data on more than 100 million phones around the world. It sends reports related to app performance, signal strength and battery life back to carriers and manufacturers.

However, some are now alleging the company also is capable of logging every keystroke on your phone and collecting much more personal data, such as text messages and locations.

Yesterday, VentureBeat (and a number of other technology blogs) reported on a statement from the FBI. During a routine journalistic inquiry, a reporter asked the FBI whether it had gathered data from Carrier IQ.

In response, the FBI replied that while it couldn’t reveal anything about information it obtained from Carrier IQ, that information was “located in an investigative file which is exempt from disclosure” and that “the records responsive to your request are law enforcement records” involved in a pending proceeding.

Most of us took that to mean that Carrier IQ, like just about every other web company, was instituting procedures to take appropriate requests from law enforcement and comply with those requests when required to do so by, say, a warrant. Companies like Microsoft, Facebook and even “do no evil” Google do the same thing, so we weren’t too shocked by the FBI’s statement.

However, our rep at Carrier IQ tells us that because of the way the company works (as an intermediary providing data to other companies, not a company providing a service to end users), it doesn’t actually work directly with the FBI.

“If approached by a law enforcement agency, we would refer them to the network operators, because the diagnostic data collected belongs to them and not Carrier IQ,” said the spokesperson.

“Carrier IQ’s data is not designed to address the special needs of law enforcement,” the source continued. In previous emails, this source had stated that what gets sent to the companies it works with is comprised only of short codes showing that a user took a specific action, not context-rich data like keystrokes and text message bodies.

“The diagnostic data that we capture is mostly historical and won’t reveal where somebody is and what they are doing on a real-time basis,” the rep concluded.

If all this is true, the FBI’s statement could be taken to mean that the FBI’s statement was about Carrier IQ data collected from wireless carriers, with whom law enforcement agents frequently work.

With Carrier IQ under some scrutiny from officials and regulators around the world, we hope to have more and better information to pass on than he-said, she-said accusations and rebuttals.

In the meantime, Carrier IQ has released a 19-page PDF report on exactly how its technology works.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The FBI is getting data about you from a wide range of sources: Facebook, Google, Microsoft — and Carrier IQ, too.

UPDATE: Carrier IQ has responded to this report with a statement of their own — one that is quite explicit and actually makes sense.

Carrier IQ monitors activity on cell phones (allegedly down to the keystroke, according to some reports) and serves that data to mobile carriers and manufacturers. These companies say they use those reports to fix apps, improve service and better understand battery life issues.

However, Carrier IQ is also turning over the same data, including information about text messages, mobile web browsing and more, to the government.

Before you get your torches and pitchforks, remember that just about every web company has a “spy guide” — that is, a manual of procedures that dictate when and how law enforcement can get information about users. And by and large, companies comply with those requests.

For example, Google recently issued a whole transparency report about global government requests for user data. In the U.S. alone, Google received a total of 5,950 government and police requests about 11,057 unique accounts during the first half of 2011. The company fully or partially complied with 93 percent of those requests.

Based on facts such as these, whether or not you take umbrage with Carrier IQ’s cooperating with the FBI should depend on your attitude toward government investigation and surveillance, not just your opinion of Carrier IQ, itself.

Carrier IQ’s working with the FBI came to light due to a recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) filing from MuckRock.

While the FBI didn’t say exactly what kinds of information it gets from Carrier IQ, it revealed that such information is “located in an investigative file which is exempt from disclosure” and that “the records responsive to your request are law enforcement records” involved in a pending proceeding.

We’ve contacted Carrier IQ to determine if these are run-of-the-mill data requests from law enforcement and will update you if and when we hear back from the company.

In the meantime, if you wish not to be monitored by corporations and the government, we politely remind you to stay off the Internet, stop using all proprietary software and hardware, disconnect your cell phone and land line immediately, and ensure a snug fit on your tin foil helmet.

By showing how many requests Google gets for user information — and exactly how many users and accounts are under some kind of surveillance — the company hopes to have a positive effect on public policies around government access to citizens’ online activities.

“All too often, policy that affects how information flows on the Internet is created in the absence of empirical data,” writes Google senior policy analyst Dorothy Chou on the company blog.

“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.”

During the first half of 2011, Google received a total of 5,950 government and/or police requests in the U.S. for information about 11,057 unique accounts, and it fully or partially complied with 93 percent of those requests.

Around the globe, Google received 15,506 data requests for 25,440 accounts and complied with about half of the requests, on average.

Generally speaking, these requests are made through appropriate legal, police and bureaucratic channels to get vital information about possible criminal or even terrorist activity. However, Google’s Transparency Report also shows interruptions to its services from various governments.

For example, the company kept track of the February 18 and March 3 blackouts of all Google services by the Libyan government and the five-day blackout of all Google services during the Egyptian Internet shutdown that began on January 27.

“By illustrating outages, this tool visualizes disruptions in the free flow of information, whether it’s a government blocking information or a cable being cut,” the company noted in the report.

And while Google does comply with lawful and justified requests to remove content or turn over user data, it sometimes pushes back against the governments making the requests.

For example, in India this year, Google fielded requests from police and government agencies to take down several YouTube clips showing protests against local leaders or using strong language to refer to religious leaders. “We declined the majority of these requests and only locally restricted videos that appeared to violate local laws prohibiting speech that could incite enmity between communities,” said the company.

In another case, Google denied a local police request to remove 236 Orkut communities and profiles. The content displayed there was critical of a local politician, but Google said, “We did not comply with this request, since the content did not violate our Community Standards or local law.”

In other cases, Google does not turn over user data for a variety of reasons. For user data requests from Russian and Turkish authorities, no data was given out, in fact.

Notably, in the United States, Google refused to remove YouTube clips showing police brutality. In these cases in particular, we are seeing how relatively neutral platforms such as YouTube can have great social impact depending on the intentions of the person posting the content and the integrity of the content host in keeping that content online.