Governments asking Google to remove more content

U.S. authorities are leading the charge as governments around the world pepper Google with more demands to remove online content and turn over information about people using its Internet search engine, YouTube video site and other services. Google provided a glimpse of the onslaught of government requests in a summary posted on its website late Sunday. The breakdown covers the final six months of last year. It’s the fifth time that Google has released a six-month snapshot of government requests since the company engaged in a high-profile battle over online censorship with China’s communist leadership in 2010. The country-by-country capsule illustrates the pressure Google faces as it tries to obey the disparate laws in various countries while also upholding its commitment to free expression and to protecting the sanctity of its more than 1 billion users’ personal information. Many of the requests are legitimate attempts to enforce laws governing hot-button issues ranging from personal privacy to hate speech. But Google says it increasingly fields requests from government agencies trying to use their power to suppress political opinions and other material they don’t like. “It’s alarming not only because free expression is at risk but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect—Western democracies not typically associated with censorship,” Dorothy Chou, Google’s senior policy analyst, writes in a blog post. Read the full story from The Associated Press here.