Official Blog
Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
New data, more facts: an update to the Transparency Report
May 14, 2015
We first launched the
Transparency Report
in 2010 to help the public learn about the scope of government requests for user data. With recent
revelations
about government surveillance,
calls for companies to make encryption keys
available to police, and a wide range of
proposals
, both in and out of the U.S., to expand surveillance powers throughout the world, the issues today are more complicated than ever. Some issues, like
ECPA reform
, are less complex, and we’re encouraged by the broad support in Congress
for
legislation
that would codify a standard requiring warrants for communications content.
Google’s position remains consistent: We respect the important role of the government in investigating and combating security threats, and we comply with valid legal process. At the same time, we’ll fight on behalf of our users against unlawful requests for data or mass surveillance. We also work to make sure surveillance laws are transparent, principled, and reasonable.
Today’s Transparency Report update
With this in mind, we’re adding some new details to our Transparency Report that we’re releasing today.
Emergency disclosure requests.
We’ve expanded our reporting on requests for information we receive in emergency situations. These emergency disclosure requests come from government agencies seeking information to save the life of a person who is in peril (like a kidnapping victim), or to prevent serious physical injury (like a threatened school shooting). We have a process for evaluating and fast-tracking these requests, and in true emergencies we can provide the necessary data without delay. The Transparency Report previously included this number for the United States, but we’re now reporting for every country that submits this sort of request.
Preservation requests.
We’re also now reporting on government requests asking us to set aside information relating to a particular user’s account. These requests can be made so that information needed in an investigation is not lost while the government goes through the steps to get the formal legal process asking us to disclose the information. We call these "preservation requests" and because they don't always lead to formal data requests, we keep them separate from the country totals we report. Beginning with this reporting period, we’re reporting this number for every country.
In addition to this new data, the report shows that we’ve received 30,138 requests from around the world seeking information about more than 50,585 users/accounts; we provided information in response to 63 percent of those requests. We saw slight increases in the number of requests from governments in Europe (2 percent) and Asia/Pacific (7 percent), and a 22 percent increase in requests from governments in Latin America.
The fight for increased transparency
Sometimes, laws and gag-orders prohibit us from notifying someone that a request for their data has been made. There are some situations where these restrictions make sense, and others not so much. We will fight—sometimes through lengthy court action—for our users’ right to know when data requests have been made. We’ve recently succeeded in a couple of important cases.
First, after years of persistent litigation in which we fought for the right to inform Wikileaks of government requests for their data, we were successful in
unsealing court documents relating to these requests
. We’re now making those documents available to the public
here
and
here
.
Second, we've fought to be more transparent regarding the U.S. government's use of
National Security Letters
, or NSLs. An NSL is a special type of subpoena for user information that the FBI issues without prior judicial oversight. NSLs can include provisions prohibiting the recipient from disclosing any information about it.
Reporters speculated in 2013
that we challenged the constitutionality of NSLs; after years of litigation with the government in several courts across multiple jurisdictions, we can now confirm that we challenged 19 NSLs and fought for our right to disclose this to the public. We also recently won the right to release additional information about those challenges and the documents should be available on the public court dockets soon.
Finally, just yesterday, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 338-88 to pass the
USA Freedom Act of 2015
. This represents a significant step toward broader surveillance reform, while preserving important national security authorities. Read more on our
U.S. Public Policy blog
.
Posted by Richard Salgado, Legal Director, Law Enforcement and Information Security
The Big Tent comes to Washington
April 26, 2013
When we started holding our
Big Tent
events in London
two years ago
, we wanted to stir up lively conversation about some of the hot topics relating to the Internet and society. After all, the political meaning of a
“big tent”
is to attract diverse viewpoints to come together in one place. Since then, we’ve held more than 20 Big Tents on three different continents to debate issues ranging from arts and culture online to the economic impact of the web.
Later today, the Big Tent is
coming to Washington, D.C.
for the first time. Along with our partner Bloomberg, we'll hear from some of the top names in media, government and the arts for discussions about one of the values we hold most dear: the
right to free expression
.
Can free speech survive in the digital age? At a time when too many governments deny their citizens the right to dissent, we’ll ask if the Internet is reaching its promise of empowering people around the world. We’ll have sessions on the limits to free speech online, national security in the Internet age, and creativity and freedom on the web.
Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt and senior vice president and chief legal officer David Drummond will be joined by a variety of speakers, including former U.S. attorney general Alberto Gonzales, deputy secretary of homeland security Jane Holl Lute, Bloomberg chief content officer Norman Pearlstine, former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, and Saudi Arabian comedian and YouTube star Omar Hussein.
Things kick off at 1:30pm EDT today—you can watch the entire event on
Bloomberg’s live stream
and tune in to the
Big Tent Google+ page
for updates as the event unfolds. Later on, we’ll also upload video clips to the
Big Tent YouTube channel
. We hope you’ll join us for exciting conversations about how to best keep the Internet free and open.
Posted by Susan Molinari, Vice President, Public Policy and Government Relations
Mapping creates jobs and drives global economic growth
January 30, 2013
Twenty years ago, we used paper maps and printed guides to help us navigate the world. Today, the most advanced digital mapping technologies—satellite imagery, GPS devices, location data and of course
Google Maps
—are much more accessible. This sea change in mapping technology is improving our lives and helping businesses realize untold efficiencies.
The transformation of the maps we use everyday is driven by a growing industry that creates jobs and economic growth globally. To present a clearer picture of the importance of the geo services industry, we commissioned studies from
Boston Consulting Group
(BCG) and
Oxera
. What we found is that maps make a big economic splash around the world.
In summary, the global geo services industry is valued at up to $270 billion per year and pays out $90 billion in wages. In the U.S., it employs more than 500,000 people and is worth $73 billion. The infographic below illustrates some examples of the many benefits of maps, whether it’s improving agriculture irrigation systems or helping emergency response teams save lives.
Click the image for a larger version
1.1 billion hours of travel time saved each year? That’s a lot of time. Also, consider
UPS
, which uses map technology to optimize delivery routes—saving 5.3 million miles and more than 650,000 gallons of fuel in 2011. And every eight seconds, a user hails a taxi with
Hailo
, which used maps and GPS to deliver more than 1 million journeys in London alone last year. Finally,
Zipcar
uses maps to connect more than 760,000 customers to a growing fleet of cars in locations around the world.
Because maps are such an integral part of how we live and do business, the list of examples goes on and on. That’s why it’s important we all understand the need to invest in the geo services industry so it continues to grow and drive the global economy. Investments can come from the public and private sectors in many forms—product innovation, support of open data policies, more geography education programs in schools and more.
We’re proud of the contributions that
Google Maps
and
Earth
, the
Google Maps APIs
and our
Enterprise solutions
have made to the geo services industry and to making maps more widely available, but there’s a long way to go. To learn more about the impact of the maps industry, see the
full reports
.
Posted by Brian McClendon, VP Google Geo
Keep the Internet free and open
December 2, 2012
Starting in 1973, when my colleagues and I proposed the technology behind the Internet, we advocated for an open standard to connect computer networks together. This wasn’t merely philosophical; it was also practical.
Our protocols were designed to make the networks of the Internet non-proprietary and interoperable. They avoided “lock-in,” and allowed for contributions from many sources. This openness is why the Internet creates so much value today. Because it is borderless and belongs to everyone, it has brought unprecedented freedoms to billions of people worldwide: the freedom to create and innovate, to organize and influence, to speak and be heard.
But starting in a few hours, a closed-door
meeting
of the world’s governments is taking place in Dubai, and regulation of the Internet is on the agenda. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is convening a conference from December 3-14 to revise a decades-old
treaty
, in which only governments have a vote. Some proposals could allow governments to justify the censorship of legitimate speech, or even cut off Internet access in their countries.
You can read more about my concerns on
CNN.com
, but I am not alone. So far, more than 1,000 organizations from more than 160 countries have
spoken up too
, and they’re joined by hundreds of thousands of Internet users who are standing up for a free and open Internet. On an interactive map at
freeandopenweb.com
, you can see that people from all corners of the world have signed our petition, used the #freeandopen hashtag on social media, or created and uploaded videos to say how important these issues are.
If you agree and want to support a free and open Internet too, I invite you to join us by signing the petition at
google.com/takeaction
. Please make your voice heard and spread the word.
Update
December 15, 2012:
At the conclusion of the ITU meeting in Dubai on Friday, 89 countries signed the treaty, while 55 countries said they would not sign or that additional review was needed. We stand with the countries who refused to sign, and with the
millions of you
who have voiced your support for a free and open web.
Posted by Vint Cerf, VP and Chief Internet Evangelist
Transparency Report: Government requests on the rise
November 13, 2012
We think it’s important to shine a light on how government actions could affect our users. When we first launched the
Transparency Report
in early 2010, there wasn’t much data out there about how governments sometimes hamper the free flow of information on the web. So we took our first step toward greater transparency by disclosing the number of government requests we received. At the time, we weren’t sure how things would look beyond that first snapshot, so we pledged to release numbers twice a year. Today we’re updating the Transparency Report with data about government requests from January to June 2012.
This is the sixth time we’ve released this data, and one trend has become clear: Government surveillance is on the rise. As you can see from the graph below, government demands for user data have increased steadily since we first launched the Transparency Report. In the first half of 2012, there were 20,938 inquiries from government entities around the world. Those requests were for information about 34,614 accounts.
The number of government requests to remove content from our services was largely flat from 2009 to 2011. But it’s spiked in this reporting period. In the first half of 2012, there were 1,791 requests from government officials around the world to remove 17,746 pieces of content.
You can see the country-by-country trends for requests to hand over
user data
and to
remove content
from our services in the Transparency Report itself, but in aggregate around the world, the numbers continue to go up.
As always, we continue to improve the Transparency Report with each data release. Like before, we’re including
annotations
for this time period with interesting facts. We’re also
showing new bar graphs
with data in addition to tables to better display content removal trends over time. We’ve now translated the entire Transparency Report into 40 languages, and we’ve expanded our FAQ—including one that explains how we sometimes
receive falsified court orders
asking us to remove content. We do our best to verify the legitimacy of the documents we receive, and if we determine that any are fake, we don’t comply.
The information we disclose is only an isolated sliver showing how governments interact with the Internet, since for the most part we don’t know what requests are made of other technology or telecommunications companies. But we’re heartened that in the past year, more companies like
Dropbox
,
LinkedIn
,
Sonic.net
and
Twitter
have begun to share their statistics too. Our hope is that over time, more data will bolster public debate about how we can best keep the Internet free and open.
Posted by Dorothy Chou, Senior Policy Analyst
A new way to visualize the global arms trade
August 3, 2012
Did you know that 60 percent of all violent deaths are due to small arms and light weapons? Small arms, such as revolvers, assault rifles and light machine guns, and ammunition represent a
multi-billion dollar industry
, and three quarters of the world’s small arms lie in the hand of civilians—more than 650 million civilian arms. As part of the Google Ideas initiative on illicit networks, we’ve created
an interactive data visualization
of global small arms and ammunition trading to better understand and map the global arms trade.
The tool was produced by Google’s Creative Lab team in collaboration with the
Igarape Institute
. More than 1 million data points on imports and exports of small arms, light weapons and ammunition between 1992 and 2010 and across 250 states and territories across the world were provided by the
Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO)
small arms database. The visualization reveals patterns and trends in imports and exports of arms and ammunition across the world, making it easy to explore how they relate to conflicts worldwide. More of the implications of this data are discussed in this video from the
INFO summit
hosted by Google Ideas last month:
You can explore these data points by zooming in and out of the globe, clicking on any country to readjust the view, and using the histogram tool at the bottom to see trading patterns over the years. You can see, for example, that the scale of the global trade in ammunition rivals the scale of trade in actual weapons, an insight underexplored by policymakers today in conflict prevention and resolution.
We built this visualization using the open source
WebGL Globe
on Google’s
Chrome Experiments
site; since it is open sourced, we hope to see others use the globe as a platform for bringing other complex datasets to life.
Update
8/16/12:
This post has been updated to reflect more accurate numbers.
Posted by Scott Carpenter, Deputy Director, Google Ideas
Google Ideas: joining the fight against drug cartels and other illicit networks
July 16, 2012
Violent illicit networks
represent a trillion-dollar problem that affects every society in the world and claims hundreds of thousands of lives each year. For example, more than 50,000 people have died in the past five years as a result of the ongoing war in Mexico between rival drug cartels. And although data on this subject is scarce and often unreliable, in 2003 the UN estimated the value of the illicit drug market to be nearly $320 billion, greater than the gross domestic product of 88 percent of countries in the world—and that was almost 10 years ago. It’s clear that illicit networks—particularly those that are violent and coercive like drug smugglers, arms dealers and human traffickers—have a devastating human and financial impact on every nation.
We think Google can help. Eighteen months ago we launched
Google Ideas
with the belief that Google is in the unique position to explore the role that technology can play in tackling some of the toughest human challenges in the world. Our first
area of focus
was counter-radicalization; last year we convened the
Summit Against Violent Extremism
with former gang members, right-wing extremists, jihadists and militants as well as survivors of violent extremism. Among the many outcomes of the summit was a
platform
that we established as a one-stop shop for tackling violent extremism through formers and survivors.
Recently, we’ve expanded our focus to include violent illicit networks such as narco-trafficking, human trafficking, organ harvesting and arms dealing. We believe that technology has the power to expose and dismantle global criminal networks, which depend on secrecy and discretion in order to function. And for the past few months, we’ve been working with people fighting on the front line to gain a better understanding of what drives these networks and how they function.
This week, in partnership with the
Council on Foreign Relations
and the
Tribeca Film Festival
, we’re convening Illicit Networks: Forces in Opposition (or the INFO summit) in Los Angeles, Calif. Too often illicit networks are seen only in the silos of those who study them. This summit aims to break down those silos by bringing together a full-range of stakeholders, from survivors of organ trafficking, sex trafficking and forced labor to government officials, dozens of engineers, tech leaders and product managers from Google and beyond. Through the summit, which lasts until Wednesday, we hope to discover ways that technology can be used to expose and disrupt these networks as a whole—and to put some of these ideas into practice.
We’ll be uploading videos from the summit to our
YouTube channel
. Keep up with the Summit via
@googleideas
and #infosummit2012, or take a look at the video below for a sneak peek.
Posted by Jared Cohen, Director, Google Ideas
Big Tent Sendai: Smarter ways to share information in a crisis
July 3, 2012
As we’ve seen in the last decade,
information technology can save lives
in a crisis. But even as data becomes more crucial to rescue efforts, key information like evacuation routes, shelter locations and weather alerts often remains inaccessible to the public. Time is of the essence in the wake of a disaster, and it's critical for emergency information to be available in open standards and formats to enable instant communication among first responders and affected populations.
This was the theme of our first
Big Tent
in Asia, held yesterday in Sendai, Japan. The event brought together tech industry leaders, non-profits, volunteers and government officials to discuss how technology can better assist in preparing for, responding to and rebuilding from disasters. This is an extremely pertinent issue for the Asia-Pacific region, as nearly
70 percent of fatalities
from natural disasters occur here. And with the earthquake and tsunami last year affecting the coastal regions of Northeastern Japan, Sendai was a particularly meaningful location to discuss new ways that technology can aid the efforts of responders to reduce the impact and cost of disasters.
During the panels, the audience heard stories about how two Pakistani volunteers mapped their home country so well through Google MapMaker that the UN’s mapping agency UNOSAT adopted the maps and provided them to aid workers during the Pakistan floods. Sam Johnson, Founder of the Christchurch Student Army and Young New Zealander of the Year, talked about using Facebook to quickly coordinate relief efforts on the ground after the earthquakes in Christchurch in 2010 and 2011. Twitter Japan Country Manager James Kondo talked about Japanese earthquake victims tweeting with the hashtag “stranded” in order to find help. Meanwhile representatives of open source project
Ushahidi
talked of “brainsourcing” reporters on the ground and remote volunteers to keep the world abreast of conditions in disasters such as the
earthquake in Chile
in 2010.
After the panels, conversations and debates, four key themes emerged. First, there is a conflict between traditional closed data architectures and emerging open models—and we need to close the gap between them. Second, we need to find complementary ways to embrace both authoritative data from official sources and crowdsourced data. Third, there’s a universal need for data, but they way it’s shared needs to be tailored to the local environment—for example, Internet-reliant countries vs. SMS-reliant countries. Finally, we were reminded that beyond the data itself, communication and collaboration are key in a crisis. Information isn’t worth anything unless people are taking that information, adapting it, consulting it and getting it to the people who need it.
One of the panels at Big Tent Sendai
Crisis response tools will continue to improve and more people across the globe will own devices to quickly access the information they need. But there are still major challenges we must address. As
Margareta Wahlström
, UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction said, we can now get quick warnings and alerts to many populations on their phones, but many who receive the alerts don’t know how to act.
To see clips from Sendai and previous events, visit the
Big Tent YouTube channel
, where you can also join in the debate via comments, get more information on the presenters and see how different communities approach many of the same issues. We’ll hold more Big Tents in Asia soon, so please check back on our
website
to learn more.
Posted by Nigel Snoad, Product Manager, Google.org Crisis Response Team
The fight against scam ads—by the numbers
May 25, 2012
This is the second in a series of posts that will provide greater transparency about how we make our ads safer by detecting and removing scam ads. -Ed.
Last month, I shared an overview of the technology Google has built to prevent bad ads from showing on Google and our partner sites, including our efforts to review
accounts, sites and ads
. To illustrate the scale of this challenge, today I’d like to provide some metrics that give greater insight into the scale of the problem we’re combating.
Bad ads have a disproportionately negative effect on our users; even a single bad ad slipping through our defenses is one too many. That’s why we’re constantly working to improve our systems and utilize new techniques to prevent bad ads from appearing on Google and our partner sites. In fact, billions of ads are submitted every year for a wide variety of products. We have a set of
ads policies
that cover a huge array of areas in more than 40 different languages. For example, because we aim to show safe, truthful and accurate ads to our users, we don’t allow ads for
misleading claims
,
ad spam
or
malware
.
Ads that are in violation of our ads policies aren’t allowed to be shown on Google and our AdSense partner sites. For many repeat offenders, we ban not just ads but also advertisers who seek to abuse our advertising system to take advantage of people. In the case of ads that are promoting
counterfeit goods
, we typically ban the advertiser after only one violation. Here are some metrics that give some insight into the scale of the impact we have had over time, showing the numbers of actions we’ve taken against advertiser accounts, sites and ads. You can see that the numbers are growing—and growing faster over time.
Year
Advertiser Accounts Suspended for Terms of Service and Advertising Policies
Sites Rejected for Site Policy
Ads Disapproved
2011
824K
610K
134M
2010
248K
398K
56.7M
2009
68.5K
305K
42.5M
2008
18.1K
167K
25.3M
We find that there are relatively few malicious players, who make multiple attempts to bypass our defenses to defraud users. As we get better and faster at catching these advertisers, they redouble their efforts and create more accounts at an even faster rate.
Even in this ever-escalating arms race, our efforts are working. One method we use to test the success of our efforts is to ask human raters to tell us how we’re doing. These human raters review a set of sites that are advertised on Google. We use a large set of sites in order to get an accurate statistical reading of our efforts. We also weight the sites in our statistical sample based on the number of times a particular site was displayed so that if a particular site is shown more often, it’s more likely to be in our sample set. By using human raters, we can calibrate our automated systems and ensure that we’re improving our efforts over time. In 2011, we reduced the percentage of bad ads
by more than 50 percent
compared with 2010. That means the proportion of bad ads that are showing on Google was halved in just a year.
Google’s long-term success is based on people trusting our products. We want to make sure that the ads on Google are safe and trustworthy, and we’re not satisfied until we do.
Posted by David W. Baker, Director of Engineering, Advertising
Transparency for copyright removals in search
May 24, 2012
We believe that openness is crucial for the future of the Internet. When something gets in the way of the free flow of information, we believe there should be transparency around what that block might be.
So two years ago we launched the
Transparency Report
, showing when and what information is accessible on Google services around the world. We
started off
by sharing data about the government requests we receive to
remove content
from our services or for
information about our users
. Then we began showing
traffic patterns
to our services, highlighting when they’ve been
disrupted
.
Today we’re expanding the Transparency Report with a
new section on copyright
. Specifically, we’re disclosing the number of requests we get from copyright owners (and the organizations that represent them) to remove Google Search results because they allegedly link to infringing content. We’re starting with search because we remove more results in response to copyright removal notices than for any other reason. So we’re providing information about
who sends
us copyright removal notices, how often, on behalf of which
copyright owners
and for
which websites
. As policymakers and Internet users around the world consider the pros and cons of
different proposals
to address the problem of online copyright infringement, we hope this data will contribute to the discussion.
For this launch we’re disclosing data dating from July 2011, and moving forward we plan on updating the numbers each day. As you can see from the
report
, the number of requests has been increasing rapidly. These days it’s not unusual for us to receive more than 250,000 requests
each week
, which is more than what copyright owners asked us to remove in all of 2009. In the past month alone, we received about 1.2 million requests made on behalf of more than 1,000 copyright owners to remove search results. These requests targeted some 24,000 different websites.
Fighting online piracy is very important, and we don’t want our search results to direct people to materials that violate copyright laws. So we’ve always responded to copyright removal requests that meet the standards set out in the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act
(DMCA). At the same time, we want to be transparent about the process so that users and researchers alike understand what kinds of materials have been removed from our search results and why. To promote that transparency, we have long shared copies of copyright removal requests with
Chilling Effects
, a nonprofit organization that collects these notices from Internet users and companies. We also include a notice in our search results when items have been removed in response to copyright removal requests.
We believe that the time-tested
“notice-and-takedown”
process for copyright strikes the right balance between the needs of copyright owners, the interests of users, and our efforts to provide a useful Google Search experience. Google continues to put substantial resources into improving and streamlining this process. We already mentioned that we’re processing more copyright removal requests for Search than ever before. And we’re also processing these requests faster than ever before; last week our average turnaround time was less than 11 hours.
At the same time, we try to catch erroneous or abusive removal requests. For example, we recently rejected two requests from an organization representing a major entertainment company, asking us to remove a search result that linked to a major newspaper’s review of a TV show. The requests mistakenly claimed copyright violations of the show, even though there was no infringing content. We’ve also seen baseless copyright removal requests being used for anticompetitive purposes, or to remove content unfavorable to a particular person or company from our search results. We try to catch these ourselves, but we also notify webmasters in our
Webmaster Tools
when pages on their website have been targeted by a copyright removal request, so that they can
submit a counter-notice
if they believe the removal request was inaccurate.
Transparency is a crucial element to making this system work well. We look forward to making more improvements to our Transparency Report—offering copyright owners, Internet users, policymakers and website owners the data they need to see and understand how removal requests from both governments and private parties affect our results in Search.
Update
December 11, 2012
: Starting today, anyone interested in studying the data can
download
all the data shown for
copyright removals
in the
Transparency Report
. We are also providing information about how often we remove search results that link to allegedly infringing material. Specifically, we are disclosing how many URLs we removed for each
request
and
specified website
, the overall removal rate for each request and the specific URLs we did not act on. Between December 2011 and November 2012, we removed 97.5% of all URLs specified in copyright removal requests. Read more on
Policy by the Numbers
.
Posted by Fred von Lohmann, Senior Copyright Counsel
Don't censor the web
January 17, 2012
You might notice many of your favorite websites look different today.
Wikipedia
is down.
WordPress
is dark. We’re censoring our homepage logo and asking you to
petition Congress
. So what’s the big deal?
Right now in Washington D.C., Congress is considering two bills that would censor the web and impose burdensome regulations on American businesses. They’re known as the
PROTECT IP Act
(PIPA) in the Senate and the
Stop Online Piracy Act
(SOPA) in the House. Here’s what they’d do:
PIPA & SOPA will censor the web.
These bills would grant new powers to law enforcement to filter the Internet and block access to tools to get around those filters. We know from experience that these powers are on the wish list of oppressive regimes throughout the world. SOPA and PIPA also eliminate due process. They provide incentives for American companies to shut down, block access to and stop servicing U.S. and foreign websites that copyright and trademark owners allege are illegal without any due process or ability of a wrongfully targeted website to seek restitution.
PIPA & SOPA will risk our industry’s track record of
innovation and job creation
.
These bills would make it easier to sue law-abiding U.S. companies. Law-abiding payment processors and Internet advertising services can be subject to these private rights of action. SOPA and PIPA would also create harmful (and uncertain) technology mandates on U.S. Internet companies, as federal judges second-guess technological measures used by these companies to stop bad actors, and potentially impose inconsistent injunctions on them.
PIPA & SOPA will not stop piracy
. These bills wouldn’t get rid of pirate sites. Pirate sites would just change their addresses in order to continue their criminal activities. There are better ways to address piracy than to ask U.S. companies to censor the Internet. The foreign rogue sites are in it for the money, and we believe the best way to shut them down is to cut off their sources of funding. As a result, Google supports alternative approaches like the
OPEN Act
.
Fighting online piracy is extremely important. We are investing a lot of time and money in that fight. Last year alone we acted on copyright takedown notices for more than 5 million webpages and invested more than $60 million in the fight against ads appearing on bad sites. And we think there is more that can be done here—like targeted and focused steps to cut off the money supply to foreign pirate sites. If you cut off the money flow, you cut the incentive to steal.
Because we think there’s a good way forward that doesn’t cause collateral damage to the web, we’re joining Wikipedia, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, Mozilla and other Internet companies in speaking out against SOPA and PIPA. And we’re asking you to
sign a petition
and join the millions who have already reached out to Congress through phone calls, letters and petitions asking them to rethink SOPA and PIPA.
Posted by David Drummond, SVP Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer
DatenDialog - Big Tent goes to Berlin
November 25, 2011
In May, we held our first
Big Tent
conference near London, where we debated some of the hot issues relating to the Internet and society with policy-makers, academics and NGOs. The term "big tent” not only described the marquee venue but also our aim to include diverse points of view.
After the U.K. success, we decided to export the concept. Yesterday we welcomed more than 200 guests in Berlin, Germany to the second Big Tent event, entitled
DatenDialog
.
This dialogue about data tackled the issue of online privacy from a variety of angles. It was appropriate to hold it in Germany, which is a pacesetter both in its concern about privacy and its ideas for safeguarding personal data. During the one-day event, we debated questions such as: what does responsible collaboration between the tech industry and the data protection authorities look like? Do we need new regulation to manage the Internet and the large amount of data produced in the online world? Who is responsible for educating users and how does the tech industry make sure it builds privacy controls into its products?
Speakers included the German State Secretary for the Interior
Cornelia Rogall-Grothe
and the Federal Data Protection Commissioner
Peter Schaar
, alongside international authors and bloggers
Cory Doctorow
and
Jeff Jarvis
who appeared via live video chat from the U.S.
The debate was always lively, sometimes polarised—Cory likened amalgamated data to nuclear waste while Jeff appealed to governments not to regulate for the worst case—but all seemed to agree that it was a worthwhile and timely exercise to explore these important issues.
You can watch the highlights soon on our
Big Tent YouTube channe
l, and stay tuned for more Big Tents on a range of topics around the world in the coming months.
Posted by Wieland Holfelder, Engineering Director, Germany
(Cross-posted from the
European Public Policy Blog
)
More data, more transparency around government requests
October 25, 2011
How do governments affect access to information on the Internet? To help shed some light on that very question, last year we launched an online, interactive
Transparency Report
. All too often, policy that affects how information flows on the Internet is created in the absence of empirical data. But by showing traffic patterns and
disruptions
to our services, and by sharing how many government requests for content removal and user data we receive from around the world, we hope to offer up some metrics to contribute to a public conversation about the laws that influence how people communicate online.
Today we’re updating the
Government Requests
tool with numbers for requests that we received from January to June 2011. For the first time, we’re not only disclosing the number of requests for user data, but we’re showing the number of users or accounts that are specified in those requests too. We also
recently released
the
raw data
behind the requests. Interested developers and researchers can now take this data and revisualize it in different ways, or mash it up with information from other organizations to test and draw up new hypotheses about government behaviors online.
We believe that providing this level of detail highlights
the need to modernize laws
like the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which regulates government access to user information and was written 25 years ago—long before the average person had ever heard of email. Yet at the end of the day, the information that we’re disclosing offers only a limited snapshot. We hope others
join us
in the effort to provide more transparency, so we’ll be better able to see the bigger picture of how regulatory environments affect the entire web.
Posted by Dorothy Chou, Senior Policy Analyst
European Commission President Barroso takes your questions on YouTube World View
September 27, 2011
(Cross-posted on the
YouTube Blog
)
Tomorrow, September 28, European Commission President
José Manuel Barroso
will deliver his annual
State of the Union Address
. In these turbulent times, we wanted to give people a chance to make their voices heard and ask their questions about the EU. So we teamed up with broadcaster
Euronews
and invited President Barroso to answer your questions in a special, live
YouTube World View
interview that will take place on Thursday, October 6 at 10:00am Central European Time.
Starting today, we invite you to submit your questions for President Barroso via
youtube.com/worldview
. Questions can be on any topic, from the Euro crisis and austerity measures to growth and jobs, from foreign policy and immigration to ethnic minority issues, human rights and the environment. You can ask written or video questions—and view and vote on other people’s questions—in any of the European Union’s languages, thanks to
Google Translate
.
During the interview on October 6, hosted by Euronews anchor Alex Taylor, the President will answer a selection of the most popular questions, as determined by your votes. The interview will be streamed and broadcast in multiple languages on both YouTube and Euronews.
President Barroso’s interview will be the first multi-lingual livecast in the
World View
series, which gives anyone with an Internet connection the ability to pose questions, vote on what’s most important to them and get answers directly from senior politicians and world leaders. President Barroso’s interview follows interviews with U.S. President Obama, President Kagame of Rwanda, U.K. Prime Minister Cameron, Spanish Prime Minister Zapatero and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Whatever your question, President Barroso wants to hear from you. Be sure to submit your question via the
World View
channel before midnight CET on Wednesday October 5.
Posted by Al Verney, Head of Communications, Google Brussels
Updated and more detailed Transparency Report
June 27, 2011
Our
Transparency Report
discloses the information that governments have asked for over the past six months. For our latest batch of data, covering July through December 2010, we wanted to improve the way we give you the information, so we’ve updated the look of the report and added more details.
We've highlighted some significant changes in the data and provided context about why those changes may have occurred during this reporting period. We’ve also made it easier for you to spot trends in the data yourself. For example, we’ve changed the format so you can now see data on a country-by-country basis. We’re also clearly disclosing the reasons why we’ve been asked to remove content—such as an allegation of defamation or hate speech.
For the first time, we’re also revealing the percentage of user data requests we’ve complied with in whole or in part. This gives you a better idea of how we’ve dealt with the requests we receive from government agencies—like local and federal police—for data about users of our services and products.
Our goal is to provide our users access to information and to protect the privacy of our users. Whenever we receive a request, we first check to make sure it meets both the letter and spirit of the law before complying. When possible, we notify affected users about requests for user data that may affect them. And, if we believe a request is overly broad, we will seek to narrow it.
We hope that our website improvements help you to see more clearly how the web is shaped by government influence and how Google responds to requests for information and removals.
Posted by Matt Braithwaite, Transparency Engineering
Inside the Big Tent
May 25, 2011
(Cross-posted from the
European Public Policy Blog
)
At our European Zeitgeist event, held annually near London, we traditionally erect a large marquee for a partner dinner and entertainment. This year we wondered if there was anything else we could do with the space once Zeitgeist was over. In that instant, the Big Tent was born.
Canvas aside, the term "big tent" has, of course, a political connotation.
Wikipedia
defines it as "seeking to attract people with diverse viewpoints...does not require adherence to some ideology as a criterion for membership." That just about sums up the idea behind last week’s Big Tent conference, which focused on debating some of the hot issues relating to the internet and society.
We invited the advocacy groups
Privacy International
and
Index on Censorship
—both of whom have criticised Google in the past—to partner with us in staging the debates, and sought diverse viewpoints among the speakers and the delegates.
Topics on the agenda included: what was the role of technology in the revolutions in the Middle East? What are the limits of free speech online? Do we need tougher privacy laws or are we in danger of stifling innovation? Can technology and access to information be used to help prevent conflict?
The result was a stimulating day of debate featuring the likes of
Big Brother
television producer
Peter Bazalgette
,
Mumsnet
founder Justine Roberts and the U.K. Culture Secretary
Jeremy Hunt
alongside Googlers including Eric Schmidt, Google Ideas’
Jared Cohen
and the Egyptian activist
Wael Ghonim
, and a highly engaged and knowledgeable audience of NGOs, policy advisers, tech businesses and journalists.
You can watch
highlights on YouTube
and see event feedback on
Twitter
. We hope to bring the Big Tent to other regions over the coming year.
Posted by Peter Barron, Director of External Relations, EMEA
Helping America’s startups grow
April 20, 2011
(Cross-posted on the
Small Business Blog
)
Every business starts out small—whether with an idea or the hanging of a shingle outside an office or storefront. Even Google was once a small business, operating out of a garage in Menlo Park, Calif. We’re proud of our success, but we’re even more proud of the role we’ve played helping a lot of other businesses grow. In fact, in 2009 Google search and advertising tools
generated $54 billion of economic activity in the United States
.
To further help new American businesses create economic growth, today we’re announcing a commitment of up to $100 million to the
Startup America Partnership
—an alliance of the country's most innovative entrepreneurs, corporations, foundations and other private sector leaders—for companies to promote their business with Google advertising over the next year.
Startup America participants will be able to use Google advertising platforms like
AdWords
and
Boost
and receive a $1,000 Google match for $1,000 spent between June 1, 2011 and June 1, 2012. Our chief economist Hal Varian has calculated that
businesses make an average of $2 in revenue for every $1 they spend
on AdWords, so we think this commitment will be especially powerful.
If you are (or know of) an entrepreneur that’s interested in getting involved with the Startup America Partnership, you can visit its
Resource Center
for more information. Our goal as a participant in this national initiative is to help entrepreneurs grow amazing businesses, and we believe our commitment will help them do it.
Posted by Claire Hughes Johnson, Vice President, Global Online Sales
Real-time traffic graphs for the Transparency Report
April 5, 2011
When we
introduced
the
Transparency Report
last year, we promised to keep looking for new and useful ways to display data about traffic to our services. In response to your requests, today we’re adding graphs for each region that show traffic patterns for all products in aggregate. These graphs will show data with a five-minute delay.
In
this graph
, for example, you’ll see that all of our services in Egypt were down from January 27 to February 1:
Starting today, you won’t have to sift through every single product graph to figure out if one or more services are inaccessible. You’ll get a snapshot up front. We’ve also added annotations for historical anomalies that we’ve seen in the traffic to our services. To see the graph for each cited incident, just click on the corresponding link.
As the Transparency Engineering team lead, part of my job is to ensure that we find, uncover and visualize datasets within Google that can help inform research and analysis on important topics. We believe that providing the facts can spark useful debate about the scope and authority of policy decisions around the globe.
We’ll continue to iterate, and we hope that the Report will help shed light on the accessibility and patterns of traffic to our services around the world.
Posted by Matt Braithwaite, Transparency Engineering Team Lead
Patents and innovation
April 4, 2011
The tech world has recently seen an explosion in patent litigation, often involving low-quality software patents, which threatens to stifle innovation. Some of these lawsuits have been filed by people or companies that have never actually created anything; others are motivated by a desire to block competing products or profit from the success of a rival’s new technology. The patent system should reward those who create the most useful innovations for society, not those who stake bogus claims or file dubious lawsuits. It's for these reasons that Google has
long argued
in favor of real patent reform, which we believe will benefit users and the U.S. economy as a whole.
But as things stand today, one of a company’s best defenses against this kind of litigation is (ironically) to have a formidable patent portfolio, as this helps maintain your freedom to develop new products and services. Google is a relatively young company, and although we have a growing number of patents, many of our competitors have larger portfolios given their longer histories.
So after a lot of thought, we’ve decided to bid for Nortel’s patent portfolio in the company’s bankruptcy auction. Today, Nortel selected our bid as the “stalking-horse bid," which is the starting point against which others will bid prior to the auction. If successful, we hope this portfolio will not only create a disincentive for others to sue Google, but also help us, our partners and the open source community—which is integrally involved in projects like Android and Chrome—continue to innovate. In the absence of meaningful reform, we believe it's the best long-term solution for Google, our users and our partners.
Posted by Kent Walker, Senior Vice President & General Counsel
Trip report: Google and YouTube in Pakistan 2010
December 21, 2010
Earlier this month, a team from Google and YouTube went to Pakistan to explore business and content opportunities, following up on Google’s
Clinton Global Initiative commitment to Pakistan
and to sponsor and participate in Pakistan’s first
International Youth Conference and Festival
. It’s hard to imagine a country more at the nexus of geo-politics today than Pakistan, and our team learned a lot about the state of the Pakistani technology, media and non-profit sectors.
Internet connectivity in Pakistan is quite low—estimates put penetration at around 10%—but opportunities for growth are evident. For one thing, broadband costs are quite cheap compared to other parts of the world—around $13/month. Smartphone usage is also on the rise, and there are a growing number of Pakistani developers who are creating mobile applications for sale both in Pakistan and abroad. Around 60% of Pakistanis have a mobile phone, and their average bill is around $3/month. Not surprisingly, SMS is one of the primary means of communication in Pakistan.
One of the keys to bringing more Pakistanis online is the amount of local Pakistani content available on the Internet. There are some great examples so far: for instance,
Coke Studio
, a “fusion” music project sponsored by Coke that features popular Pakistani musicians, grew so popular on YouTube last summer that it was the 11th-most viewed
channel
on the site. Dozens of news organizations have begun to use YouTube as a global distribution platform as well, reaching not only Pakistanis online but the diaspora abroad. The Pakistani media is young and voracious—it was just eight years ago that the government opened up the airwaves to allow non-state media channels to exist, and in that short time the media has grown to become an important player in the public discourse in Pakistan, despite occasional crackdowns from authorities. Citizen media has also played an increasingly big role in Pakistan: for example many Pakistanis used cellphone cameras to document the devastation wrought by
the floods
in Pakistan last summer.
Google.org granted $1 million to Pakistani
flood relief
in September, localized crisis response tools, and launched a
flood relief landing page
. On our trip we met with several non-profits who are doing incredible work to help the affected citizens get back on their feet. Our products, in particular
Google MapMaker
, proved to be of use to flood relief agencies for tracking development in the wake of the tragedy. Over countless cups of hot chai and mixed grilled barbecues, we heard stories of ordinary Pakistanis using Google technology to document the flood and connect with one another during the crisis.
Pakistan’s future no doubt lies with its youth—an incredible 62% of Pakistanis are under the age of 25. Perhaps the highlight of our trip was the International Youth Conference we participated in, which was run by an organization called
Khudi
. Khudi was founded by the dynamic
Maajid Nawaz
, a former extremist who changed his views towards moderate Islam and has since devoted his life to educating young people on freedom of expression and anti-extremism (Nawaz also
spoke at
Google Zeitgeist this year). It was inspiring to meet leaders like Nawaz who are committed to emboldening Pakistan’s younger generations to use the web to bring Pakistan to the rest of the world, and to give the rest of the world a more complete picture of Pakistan. In this way we saw an opportunity for technology to not only foster economic development, but also to break down borders in the region. We asked a few of the Pakistani leaders we met with to talk about Pakistan’s future, and here’s what they had to say.
This was the largest delegation of Googlers ever to visit Pakistan, and we’re looking forward to continued engagement in the region.
Posted by Steve Grove, Head of News & Politics, YouTube and John Lyman, Google.org
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