The governments of the world are asking Google to provide some information on roughly seventy thousand customer accounts. There were close to forty – five requests made about these accounts. Google, however, only heeded to a little over half of these requests after having done some extensive review on those requests.
These requests from the government are all associated with a crime under investigation. More than fourteen thousand information requests from the government were made in the United States alone. More or less thirty thousand accounts were involved. Google responded to about eighty percent of these requests.
Google is unable to provide specific details of these requests. The government had restricted them from doing so. The company can only give an estimate of these requests. They have about six months to comply to respond the request.
Five hundred to almost a thousand requests were from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. These were sent during the early months of 2015. Early this year, the numbers increased to more than sixteen thousand requests. A National Security Letter was also issued in the later part of 2015 but the FBI revoked the court order for it.
Germany comes second to the United States with the greatest number of government requests. Next in line is France with four thousand three hundred and India follows with three thousand four hundred. United Kingdom takes fourth place with three thousand three hundred.
There were some three hundred ninety requests from the government in Turkey but Google hardly responded to these requests. Only about one percent of the requested data were produced. There’s no question to this response, however, because the country does not have good reputation on human rights.
The U.S. had been enforcing reforms on surveillance laws for a few years now. Congress is also working on changes to a FISA Section 702. This rule would permit inquisition on individuals not residing in the United States.
In the transparency report from Google, usage of HTTPS is now included. A lot of famous sites still are not carrying out this mandate.
