The United States’ demand for user data from Google continued to increase this year, with law enforcement agencies nationwide submitting requests 7,969 times for the first six months of the year, Google revealed Wednesday.
The jump, from 6,321 demands for data during the previous six-month period, covered 16,281 user accounts compared to 12,243 accounts from the company’s previous Transparency Report.
Google, which offers e-mail, cloud storage, a blogging platform, web search, and other services, has released a Transparency Report every six months since 2009. The reports provide information on requests for data from governments around the world, as well as on takedown requests submitted to Google’s various services for suspected copyright infringement, defamation and other reasons.
Of the 31 nation’s surveyed, the U.S. led the pack in requests for user data. India came in second with 2,319 requests for data on 3,467 accounts. The United Kingdom, Brazil, France and Germany each made roughly 1,500 requests.
Overall globally, the number of requests have skyrocketed from 12,539 at the end of 2009, when Google first began producing the reports, to 20,938 in the latest reporting period.
“This is the sixth time we’ve released this data, and one trend has become clear: Government surveillance is on the rise,” Google said in a statement.
In addition to the statistics Google released on government data and takedown requests, the search giant also released figures showing the number of times it has acquiesced to court orders to remove content from its search results, YouTube and other products and services. The bulk of these requests stemmed from disputes surrounding issues of trademark and defamation.
The U.S. also led the way in these requests, with a 46 percent increase from the prior six months. The company said that during the first half of this year, it removed 1,664 Google Groups posts for defamation reasons, 641 search results for the same reason and 156 search results for trademark violations — all in response to court orders.
Google’s transparency data is limited, as it does not include requests submitted under the Patriot Act, which can include National Security Letters that come with gag orders attached to them. Nor does the data include anti-terrorism eavesdropping court orders, known as FISA orders, or any dragnet surveillance programs legalized in 2008, as those are secret, too.
The data Google hands over to governments can include e-mail communications, documents, browsing activity and IP addresses used to create and access an account, among other things.
While Google has become increasingly more transparent in providing these numbers, the company’s reports contain a glaring omission. Nowhere do they indicate how many times the company actually turned over user data in the U.S. as a result of probable-cause warrants it received requesting data.
Google on Tuesday declined to provide that figure or respond to questions about why it does not disclose the information. The company also will not say how often it turns over data without a probable-cause warrant, which it can do, since U.S. law does not always require a warrant for such data.
The 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act currently allows the government to acquire a suspect’s e-mail or other stored content from an internet service provider without showing probable cause that a crime was committed, as long as the content has been stored on a third-party server for 180 days or more. Under ECPA, the government only needs to show that it has “reasonable grounds to believe” the information would be useful in an investigation.
Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) on Thursday is attempting to remedy this by pushing an amendment through his committee that would offer sweeping digital privacy protections by requiring the government, for the first time, to get a probable-cause warrant to obtain e-mail and other content stored in the cloud.
ECPA was adopted at a time when digital storage of content was expensive and e-mail wasn’t stored on servers for long periods of time. In the 1980s, e-mail more than 6 months old was assumed abandoned, and therefore ripe for the taking without a probable-cause warrant. As storage capacities have increased and become cheaper, users are storing more content for indefinite periods.
U.S. Requests Rising for Google User Data
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