Google publishes its report every six months and the latest one refers to the second half of 2015. It indicates that the public authorities’ requests have seen a growth of 29% from 2014 to 2015.

The report also presents the numbers of requests ranked by countries. The leading position is held by the US (12.523), followed by Germany (7.491), France (4.174), UK (3.497) and India (3.295). Google notes that, in spite of this high number, it agreed to hand over only “some” user data and only for 64% of the total worldwide requests.

Richard Salgado, Google’s legal director for law enforcement and information security, declares in the Public Policy Blog, to be proud of the American company’s work in “helping shed light on government surveillance laws and practices across the world”. He also notes the recent efforts undertaken by governments in improving the protection of users’ privacy. In particular, he refers to the recent agreement on Privacy Shield, achieved thanks to the strong cooperation between the European Commission and the United States Department of Commerce.

Yahoo!Tech reports that the number of times Google has produced data following a government request remains a good 12% less than what was their practice in 2010, even though the percentage has slightly gone up compared to 2014.

The phenomenon of increasing government requests for user data does not seem to be a Google prerogative. Indeed, Computer World observes that Microsoft has also seen the requests number getting higher year by year. However, the company accepted to disclose user data just 2.45% of the time, according to the Microsoft Requests Report.

By Ilaria Fevola