Well...
Its because Google collects more personal information than the NSA / CIA / etc., and for free too.
Google tool ranks gov appetite for your private data
Brazil and the United States topped the list of nations demanding private information about Google users, according to a tool the web giant unveiled Tuesday. Brazil sought information 3,663 times in the last six months of 2009, a figure that was closely followed by the US, with 3,580, according to the tool. That amounts to an …
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But UK would be worse than USA if ...
... if the data was more logically expressed, eg as a percentage of the population -- which makes more sense, because clearly more people means more of them doing things which might give reasons for governments to invade their privacy.
For example, though USA requests are more than three times those of the UK, the USA population is about *five* times larger. Re-express that in percentage terms and the UK would truthfully show as much worse than USA.
Of course, you'll have to do all the figures to see how other smaller countries affect the figures, but clearly USA and Brazil aren't actually the worst two.
You forgot per capita statistics
I noticed in a news article about this that while evil Washington DC asked for data 123 time, even eviller Ottawa, Ontario asked 16 times. As the US has about 10 times the population of Canada, this means that Canada is asking for data about 35% more often per capita.
Statistics, gentlemen, statistics!
Same thing with the land of NuLabour
According to the BBC the UK authorities made 1,166 requests while the US ones 3,580. The UK population is about 61 million while the US one is about 305 million, which makes HMG about 37% more private data-hungry than the US administration.
patriot act
I thought that they weren't allowed to say if information has been requested if it was regarding the activities of a terry wrist. Am I wrong?
re: Patriot act @frank 3
I doubt these enquiries are all about terrorists. In the UK it's likely the subjects of these enquiries were suspected of searching for erotic comics online, schools outside of their Government allotted district or tips on overfilling refuse collection bins.
Meh
Oddly meaningless numbers presented in a statistically insignificant way.
Why are Google bothering with this? Are they trying to say "look how good we are" while they siphon away our privacy elsewhere?
FOI?
I wonder if through a FOI request we could find out what/who these requests were for.
Its why I don't use google for anything
but searches and even then, I wipe out the cookies periodically.
Interesting comment, cmaurand -
do you feel comfortable with what seems to be your assumption that these governments are not requesting (?) information and take-downs of firms other than Google ?...
Henri
Google is not the bad guy
It sure looks to me that the government is the one who is snooping. Google is simply providing something that the customer is asking for, and being open about it. Maybe the government should take a hint. After all, Google is polling better in customer satisfaction than the government is. That should tell us something.
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