“Government surveillance is on the rise,” Google said after it released its sixth transparency report today. The company releases the bi-annual reports in order to keep governments accountable as Internet companies receive more and more requests to hand over or remove data.

Today’s report represents the first half of 2012, beginning in January and ending in June. Google’s first transparency report in 2009 revealed that governments around the world made 12,539 requests for specific users’ data. That number has steadily increased, and today Google announced it received the most requests for user data it has ever seen: 20,938 requests on 34,614 different user accounts.

On top of that, Google says requests to take down data also spiked. Governments made 1,791 requests to remove 17,475 piece of data.

“The information we disclose is only an isolated sliver showing how governments interact with the Internet, since for the most part we don’t know what requests are made of other technology or telecommunications companies,” said Senior Policy Analyst Dorothy Chou in a blog post. “Our hope is that over time, more data will bolster public debate about how we can best keep the Internet free and open.”

The company doesn’t let the governments sit in anonymity, however. It provides a list of the countries that submit requests and provides a snapshot of the kinds of data that government tries to take down. You can see these on its annotations page. For example, Google detailed that it received removal requests from 10 new countries, including Saudi Arabia, Hungary, Slovakia, and Azerbaijan.

It also doesn’t comply with all of the requests. In the U.S., Google was asked to remove seven YouTube videos “for criticizing local and state government agencies, law enforcement, or public officials.” Google did not take down any of those videos.

Keyhole image via Shutterstock

Google is opening up more channels for fielding copyright complaints about YouTube videos, thanks to a change in how the company monitors Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)takedown requests via web search.

Yesterday, Google announced it is tweaking its web search to take into account the number of DMCA takedown notices a website has received.

These notices are used to tell a website copyrighted material owned by another party is being used somewhere on the site and that the copyright owner would like it taken off. Google, whose highly-ranked search engine results drive tons of traffic to websites every day, will push websites with too many DMCA takedown notices lower down the search results page.

The search company, which owns YouTube, already takes into account complaints submitted via YouTube. YouTube has its own request form that is not connected to DMCA requests. If your content was stolen and posted to YouTube, you can go to this link and YouTube Copyright Center, choose whether you are a content owner or a regular YouTube user, and file a complaint there. The center also provides copyright educational materials.

In a phone chat with Google, we learned the new web search-driven takedown calculations will also apply to YouTube, effectively giving the parent company two channels for monitoring copyright complaints about YouTube clips.

YouTube image via Rego – d4u.hu/Flickr