Google discloses demands for censorship, user data. It’s new government search tool exposes state censorship and demands for user information. Emily Butselaar reports

Google has released a new tool that maps, country by country, how often government’s demand it censors the web. For the first time users will be able to see which countries ask the web giant to hand over user information or remove information.

In a post on the company’s official blog Google pledged greater transparency around government requests, arguing candour will lead to less censorship. In the post, David Drummond, Google’s Chief Legal Officer explains:

So it’s no surprise that Google, like other technology and telecommunications companies, regularly receives demands from government agencies to remove content from our services. Of course many of these requests are entirely legitimate, such as requests for the removal of child pornography. We also regularly receive requests from law enforcement agencies to hand over private user data. Again, the vast majority of these requests are valid and the information needed is for legitimate criminal investigations. However, data about these activities historically has not been broadly available. We believe that greater transparency will lead to less censorship.

We are today launching a new Government Requests tool to give people information about the requests for user data or content removal we receive from government agencies around the world. For this launch, we are using data from July-December, 2009, and we plan to update the data in 6-month increments. Read this post to learn more about our principles surrounding free expression and controversial content on the web.

We already try to be as transparent as legally possible with respect to requests. Whenever we can, we notify users about requests that may affect them personally. If we remove content in search results, we display a message to users. The numbers we are sharing today take this transparency a step further and reflect the total number of requests we have received broken down by jurisdiction. We are also sharing the number of these content removal requests that we do not comply with, and while we cannot yet provide more detail about our compliance with user data requests in a useful way, we intend to do so in the future.

The tool shows data and removal requests, Brazil tops the list with 3,663 data requests, the US made 3,580 and the UK came third with 1,166.  Of the 59 removal request made, 76.3 per cent were complied or partially complied with. The list does include China because because “Chinese officials consider censorship demands as state secrets” and the data details requests between 1 July and 31 December 2009, before Google pulled out of its google.cn joint venture over censorship concerns.

Google new release came on the same day 10 privacy commissioners, including Britain’s Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham and regulators from Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Spain — released a letter criticising the company for its “disappointing disregard” of user’s privacy. The letter, addressed to Google’s Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, claims  “the privacy rights of the world’s citizens are being forgotten as Google rolls out new technological applications.” It cites Google’s social networking tool Buzz and Google Street View. Buzz’s launch in February 2010 sparked an outcry, its basic privacy settings exposed user’s personal information including their contacts and the people they emailed most.