UK tops Google's European censorship list

Wednesday, 21 April 2010 , Posted by Ed Allen at 04:50

The British Government made more requests for content to be removed from Google in 2009 than any other country in Europe, according to figures made available by the web giant earlier today.

This information was released by Google as part of their newly unveiled 'Government Requests Tool', a new web application which allows the user to see which governments requested pages removed and information about Google's users. The censorship map tool was released following a surprise announcement on the official Google blog. It seems that the tool was intended to be a response to recent complaints about the company's handling of privacy issues and as a demonstration of Google's desire to be open and transparent.

Google received 1,166 user information requests from British government agencies, and 59 requests for content to be removed. Google complied with 76.3 per cent of the removal requests. France, by comparison, made 846 data requests of which fewer than 10 were removal requests.

Globally, Britain ranks third in terms of data requests, behind Brazil (3,663) and the United States (3,580). Google claim that they are unable to release figures for China (a large red question mark appears in the place of numerical data over China when you use the tool), where Google faced heavy censorship before withdrawing earlier this year, because the Chinese government consider censorship demands to be state secrets.

For those of you who wish to check out the data for themselves, the Government Requests Tool can be found here.

Source: The Times & Techradar