Google has been issuing transparency reports detailing government requests to have content removed for a while now. The latest instalment promises more detail, including when governments have asked for individual user data. For Australia, the number of removal requests has dropped, but there were 345 requests for individual user information between July and December 2010, and Google coughed up in around 280 cases.
According to Google, that number (which covers Google and YouTube) isn’t significantly up on the preceding six months. All requests related to law enforcement.
Because there were fewer than 10 content removal requests, Google doesn’t provide any context on what happened (unlike last year, when Google Groups was in the spotlight for no very obvious reason). That means that we’ve actually got less data than in previous reports. That said, given the millions of people who use Google every day, 280 items of user data and 10 takedowns is pretty much a drop in the ocean.
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