Someone in a Canberra office has been busy with their browser. Between July and December last year, Australian government agencies asked Google to remove 646 items online.
According to its Transparency Report, which is updated every six months, Google only complied with 35 per cent of those requests. The vast majority were for web search results due to “privacy and security”, with a handful from other Google services.
Google divides its numbers into two categories: the number of content removal requests (17 this time around in Australia, 10 in the preceding six months) and the number of items requested (646 this time, just 10 the six months before). That big increase suggests that one agency found a lot of results it objected to. Whether that’s border security, illegal content or embarrassing pictures of ministerial hairstyles is anybody’s guess.
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