Google Inc has set up a new tool to show where it’s facing the most government pressure to censor material and turn over personal information about its users.
The country-by-country breakdown, released on Tuesday at www.google.com/governmentrequests, marks the first time that the Internet search leader has provided such a detailed look at the censorship and data requests that it gets from regulators, courts and other government agencies.
The figures cover the final half of last year and will be updated every six months.
Google posted the numbers nearly a month after it began redirecting search requests to its China-based service. Those requests are now handled in Hong Kong so Google wouldn’t have to obey Beijing’s Internet censorship laws.
Google said details about the censorship demands it got while in China still aren’t being shared because the information is classified as a state secret.
In other countries, Google is making more extensive disclosures about censorship demands or other government requests to edit its search results. Google is also including demands to remove material from its other services, including the YouTube video site, although it is excluding removal requests related to allegations of copyright infringement, a recurring problem for YouTube.
In the US, for instance, Google received 123 requests to remove material from its services during the last half of last year and complied with 80 percent of them. Reasons include violations of Google’s own policies regarding extreme violence, profanity and hate speech.
Brazil’s government peppered Google with the most requests during the six-month period covered. The company says that’s largely because it operates a social network called Orkut. That service has attracted millions of users in Brazil and generates more taunting, derogatory language and other inflammatory material likely to trigger government requests and violate its own standards.
Google received 3,663 requests for user data and 291 requests to remove material from Brazil. Nearly 200 involved Orkut.
Other countries logging at least 1,000 requests for user data were the US (3,580), UK (1,166) and India (1,061).
After Brazil, the most requests to edit material came from Germany, at 188. The country has laws that restrict the online display of content connected to the Nazi regime.
Meanwhile, Google is in talks to acquire ITA Software Inc, a maker of travel programs used by companies including Orbitz Worldwide Inc and Microsoft Corp, three people familiar with the matter said.
ITA Software may seek about US$1 billion, said two of the people, who asked not to be identified because the discussions haven’t been made public.
Google could use ITA Software’s tools, which help users find online flight information, to compete with features offered by Microsoft.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY BLOOMBERG
Also See: What really worries Goldman Sachs about the SEC investigation
AGING: As of last month, people aged 65 or older accounted for 20.06 percent of the total population and the number of couples who got married fell by 18,685 from 2024 Taiwan has surpassed South Korea as the country least willing to have children, with an annual crude birthrate of 4.62 per 1,000 people, Ministry of the Interior data showed yesterday. The nation was previously ranked the second-lowest country in terms of total fertility rate, or the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime. However, South Korea’s fertility rate began to recover from 2023, with total fertility rate rising from 0.72 and estimated to reach 0.82 to 0.85 by last year, and the crude birthrate projected at 6.7 per 1,000 people. Japan’s crude birthrate was projected to fall below six,
US President Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times published on Thursday said that “it’s up to” Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) what China does on Taiwan, but that he would be “very unhappy” with a change in the “status quo.” “He [Xi] considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing, but I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that, and I don’t think he’ll do that. I hope he doesn’t do that,” Trump said. Trump made the comments in the context
SELF-DEFENSE: Tokyo has accelerated its spending goal and its defense minister said the nation needs to discuss whether it should develop nuclear-powered submarines China is ramping up objections to what it sees as Japan’s desire to acquire nuclear weapons, despite Tokyo’s longstanding renunciation of such arms, deepening another fissure in the two neighbors’ increasingly tense ties. In what appears to be a concerted effort, China’s foreign and defense ministries issued statements on Thursday condemning alleged remilitarism efforts by Tokyo. The remarks came as two of the country’s top think tanks jointly issued a 29-page report framing actions by “right-wing forces” in Japan as posing a “serious threat” to world peace. While that report did not define “right-wing forces,” the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs was
PREPAREDNESS: Given the difficulty of importing ammunition during wartime, the Ministry of National Defense said it would prioritize ‘coproduction’ partnerships A newly formed unit of the Marine Corps tasked with land-based security operations has recently replaced its aging, domestically produced rifles with more advanced, US-made M4A1 rifles, a source said yesterday. The unnamed source familiar with the matter said the First Security Battalion of the Marine Corps’ Air Defense and Base Guard Group has replaced its older T65K2 rifles, which have been in service since the late 1980s, with the newly received M4A1s. The source did not say exactly when the upgrade took place or how many M4A1s were issued to the battalion. The confirmation came after Chinese-language media reported
RSS