Google sent a letter to the U.S. Attorney General and FBI today asking for permission to include secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act orders in its transparency reports — something it could not do before because of the gag-order that often comes attached to these information requests.

Google, still reacting to news that recently broke out about a national data surveillance program called PRISM, made the request while reinforcing it’s earlier message that it has never given it has never given the U.S. government “unfettered access to our users’ data.” It went on to say that keeping these FISA orders secret is leading people to believe that Google participates in this kind of data sharing. Google’s transparency report lists all the different data and take-down requests it receives from governments around the world. FISA requests, however, are obviously missing.

If granted, Google would publish the number of FISA requests it receives and how many accounts the requests affect. It’s an effort to show that each request is limited and specified and that there is no firehose of data about all of its users leaving the company such as was required in a recently revealed secret court order sent to Verizon.

“Google has nothing to hide,” said David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, in the letter. “Transparency here will likewise serve the public interest without harming national security.”

Drummond explained that no problems have resulted from the government’s previous approval of Google adding the quantity of received National Security Letters to the transparency report. Thus, adding FISA orders would likely not have much impact on their effectiveness either.

Google sign image via Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

The social/news/media network published its second Twitter Transparency Report today in conjunction with #DataPrivacyDay. Twitter’s goal is to be open about revealing how many government requests it gets for user information and DMCA copyright takedowns. Its first Transparency Report was published seven months ago, in July.

“These growing inquiries can have a serious chilling effect on free expression – and real privacy implications,” Twitter’s legal policy manager, Jeremy Kessel, wrote in the post. The data shows that governments and copyright holders are plenty interested in Twitter. Not so much in tweeting, however.

Since January 1, 2012, Twitter has received a total of 1,858 information requests, 48 removal requests, and 6,646 copyright violation notices. Government requests are up from 859 in the first half of the year to 1,009 in the second half, while copyright violation notices are down slightly, with 3,378 notices in the first half of 2012, and 3,268 in the last six months.

The United States continues to be the 800-pound gorilla of data-hungry countries. It was responsible for 1,494 of those 1,858 information requests in 2012 — a full 81 percent of all the requests received by Twitter. Sixty percent of those come via subpoenas, 11 percent via court order, another 19 percent via warrants, and 10 percent through other channels. The most common type, subpoenas, are generally used to obtain a Twitter user’s email address and IP (internet protocol) addresses. They do not require a judge’s sign-off.

How do you know if your data has been requested?

Source: Twitter

US Information requests

Twitter says its policy is to notify you if at all possible, but it only notified 24 percent of people whose data was requested. That’s simply due to the fact that, in some cases, the network was prohibited by law from notifying users, and in other cases, Twitter did not comply with the request due to insufficient data or a withdrawn request.

Copyright notices are the big kahuna of takedown attempts, with 3,378 notices in the first half of 2012, and 3,268 in the second half.

Only 53 percent of those 3,268 requests were successful in getting tweets taken down, but they still affected 7,205 user accounts and caused 5,557 tweets to be “withheld,” Twitter’s new process for removing but not deleting offending tweets.

Recording industry watchdog RIAA accounted for only 120 of the takedown notices, a 14 percent drop. The lion’s share were from Websheriff, which is an online service that finds and reports the unauthorized use of copyrighted materials — but many of these were probably also music-related, as the service calls itself “the Music Industry’s top web enforcer.”

Why are so many of the government data requests coming from the U.S.?

According to Twitter, that is simply because it is based in San Francisco. That’s a little surprising, given that far less than half of Twitter users are U.S.-based, and according to some reports, China and India are more active on the network (although that is disputed by others).

I wonder if data privacy advocates would agree with Twitter’s reason.

photo credit: Frederic Poirot via photopin cc

In an effort to stay transparent, Google released details of its three-point plan for handling government requests for its users’ email and cloud services today.

The move is significant because the majority of companies that store exuberant amounts of user data in the cloud don’t normally outline exactly how they handle requests for data, perhaps fearing that it’ll paint their services as unsafe. Right now, privacy laws for Internet user data are somewhat vague on the federal level, which could create problems down the road. Google, which has long advocated for transparency, said it gets about 1,400 requests a month from U.S. authorities for access to email accounts and documents.

“It’s important for law enforcement agencies to pursue illegal activity and keep the public safe. We’re a law-abiding company, and we don’t want our services to be used in harmful ways,” said Google SVP and chief legal officer David Drummond in a blog post today. “But it’s just as important that laws protect you against overly broad requests for your personal information.”

Google provided the following information regarding how it handles governmental requests:

• We scrutinize the request carefully to make sure it satisfies the law and our policies. For us to consider complying, it generally must be made in writing, signed by an authorized official of the requesting agency, and issued under an appropriate law.

• We evaluate the scope of the request. If it’s overly broad, we may refuse to provide the information or seek to narrow the request. We do this frequently.

• We notify users about legal demands when appropriate so that they can contact the entity requesting it or consult a lawyer. Sometimes we can’t, either because we’re legally prohibited (in which case we sometimes seek to lift gag orders or unseal search warrants) or we don’t have their verified contact information.

• We require that government agencies conducting criminal investigations use a search warrant to compel us to provide a user’s search query information and private content stored in a Google Account—such as Gmail messages, documents, photos and YouTube videos. We believe a warrant is required by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure and overrides conflicting provisions in ECPA.

Google’s transparency plan also includes continuing to update users via its regular transparency report as well as pushing for a revision to the U.S. Electronic Communications Privacy Act to ensure digital information enjoys the same protection as traditional documents.

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.

“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

With six million tweets circulating per day, it’s no surprise that Twitter receives hundreds of requests from governments and copyright holders to remove content.

In the new report, we gain insight into three categories of requests from the first six months of 2012: government requests for user information, government requests to withhold content, and requests from copyright holders to remove infringing content.

Complaints concerning copyright infringement far outweighed requests for user information. Between Jan. 1 and June 30 of 2012, Twitter received 3,378 requests to remove copyrighted material and complied with roughly 600 of them.

And government officials are showing more interest in Twitter than ever before. The social media site received more requests in the first half of 2012 than it received throughout 2011. The rates of compliance are also shockingly high: In 2012, Twitter fulfilled more than 75 percent of these requests. Similarly to Google, the vast majority of user information requests are levied by agencies from within the United States.

Google offered props to Twitter this morning for its efforts to be more transparent. In an interview with VentureBeat, Christine Chen, a spokesperson from Google, said she hopes the move will inspire more Internet companies to follow suit. Notably, Facebook has yet to publish information about the nature of the requests it receives for user data.

“The more transparent that companies and governments are, the more meaningful the public debate can be about the free flow of information online,” said Chen.

Twitter bird image via Shutterstock; Transparency Report screenshots via Twitter 

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Google is rolling out a new section of its Transparency Report today that provides detailed information about copyright infringement removal requests.

“We believe that openness is crucial for the future of the Internet. When something gets in the way of the free flow of information, we believe there should be transparency around what that block might be,” Google stated in a recent blog post announcing the new section of the report.

The company first launched the Transparency Report about two years ago, which primarily focused on the number of URL or content removal requests  — as well as requests for personal data of an individual — made by governments across the world.

The new section of the report details the companies and organizations that are asking Google to remove content or de-index a URL from search results on the basis of copyright infringement. In the past month, the report indicates that 1,246,854 URLs have been targeted for removal from over 24,000 domains. The top sites being listed are shady sounding domains, such as Filestube.com, 4shared.com, zippyshare.com, etc.

So, who exactly is requesting these removals? The report indicates that over 1,200 copyright owners have asked for removals (either directly, or from an organization representing them). Here’s he shocking part though.

While companies/organizations like NBCUniversal, Lionsgate, the RIAA, and BPI (the British version of RIAA) are all at the top of the list for copyright infringement URL takedown requests, none of them come close to the top company — Microsoft, with a total of 552,252 requests.

Google also says the number of requests has been increasing rapidly, and that its not unusual for the company to receive more than 250,000 requests each week. That’s more than what copyright owners asked it to remove in all of 2009.

“Fighting online piracy is very important, and we don’t want our search results to direct people to materials that violate copyright laws. So we’ve always responded to copyright removal requests that meet the standards set out in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA),” Google states. “At the same time, we want to be transparent about the process so that users and researchers alike understand what kinds of materials have been removed from our search results and why.”

The company said it will eventually provide information about content removal requests, such as those made through its video site YouTube.

In terms of how Google goes about these copyright infringement requests is pretty reasonable at least on YouTube. Once contacted by a copyright holder, it removes the content in question and contacts the user responsible. That user can then appeal the infringement claim, and if Google hasn’t heard back from the copyright holder after a two weeks, its restored.

With its search results, it’s not as easy, but Google said it’s working hard to better identify the legitimate requests and discard all the others.

Copyright stamp photo via filmfoto /Shutterstock