A very interesting map and information released from Google, which Luke Allnutt, on a new section of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty noticed -- a map of requests from governments around the world to Google for data on users or to block information.
At first glance, it looks as if the Internet freedom-fighters need to switch their targets from Iran and China to...the United States, France, and Brazil given how much the net nannies are running to Daddy Google to discipline others.
The U.S. -- by a landslide! -- has made the most requests for data on customers and blocks of information any other country on earth -- 4,000 in a six-month period, with Brazil next at 2,000 plus and India at 1,000 plus.
What Google won't explain, however, is whether this is *censorship of political data* or related to child pornography or terrorism. And that's why this "Google 2.0 transparency" is rather...partial.That is, it says that very few political requests are in fact reflected in this data, but they simply make no explanation at all about that high U.S. number.
Perhaps there is a multiplier effect at work: because the U.S. has a very robust Internet and Google is based in the U.S. and the system for removal is known, the U.S. may tend to show up more as a user of this "removals" request than other countries that may not have yet figured out to make recourse of it.
Google explains that for Brazil, as for India, the high number of requests for information on customers is explained by its wildly popular social website Orkut -- wildly popular in some countries anyway, as it is one of those Google platforms that didn't take on elsewhere, but did in those countries, in the millions. Most of the requests have to do with asking for information on users charged with "defamation".
I'm going to state the cliche here and say that this is likely because Brazil has a culture of honour and respect as well as a heightened sense of defamation from its traditions and laws, like certain other Latin American cultures -- this is an obvious fact. And here it shows up in spades -- somebody dissed somebody else, somebody looked cross-eyed, out come fingers to punch the Abuse Report buttons and get someone "removed from the Internet". Impersonization is the other problem reported.
Judging from Second Life, I thought it might be something about scams or content theft, as regretably, the vibrant and -- for a time surging -- community of Brazil in SL had a certain percentage of copy-botters and scammers. (But Google is *not* counting copyright-requests in this data.)
I constantly was plagued by several con artists who would either put invisiprims over my rental boxes and siphon my tenants' money off to themselves, or actually, in a ballsy gambit that I had to marvel at, call themselves representatives of my business, take photos of my properties and put them in their profiles, and go around with a group title saying they were Ravenglass mangers and extort and demand rental or protection payments that way.
One guy amazingly moved in on a lot where somebody hadn't paid on time, said he was the girl's roomie and would pay, got put in resident status with that lie, then proceeded to build -- and rent out within 24 hours -- a high-rise apartment building that sucked down every prim on the sim -- oh, and a car store and a fashion runway. It was so outrageous, and something so unexpected, that I at first thought it was someone next door to me, and actually let it go for several days before I realized that it was on my property. Amazing! A guy like that, you don't know whether to hire him -- or ban him from your sim.
Others have had their designs ripped off by Brazilians or suffered other business-in-a-box rip-offs. The fact is, the first victims of such Brazilians is...other Brazilians. Even so, the prejudice that these incidents from a minority of the community sparks is enormous, and it's gotten so some people simply ban Brazilians on sight. I have loads of them as customers, and I have to say that they are incredible energy for socializing and entrepreneurship. We use HUD translators to converse. Brazil, out of all the BRIC up-and-comers, will take over the earth, I'm sure.
But...we do need to get them to climb down from this crazy macho stuff where every insult is viewed as a reason to call Google and get someone removed.
Now, what's wrong with this picture! This is as truthy as truthyness gets, because the U.S. least of countries block the Internet -- the UK is highly represented due to its libel law venue shopping; the U.S. has First Amendment protections. The high traffic of requests doesn't equal a regime of censorship; Iran isn't reflecting its real role as a notorious Internet enemy.
Russia is reported as "fewer than 10". That's ridiculous, because they do take down sites and block material -- but that's just it. They are big enough with a sophisticated enough Internet of their own that maybe they don't need to call Google, they do their own blocking. Because of the language barrier, most customers are going to be on Yandex.ru or somewhere else searching anyway -- I'm not sure how much they use Google per se.
And while everyone thinks Google is a hero for standing up to China, note that they still cave on some things:
You may have noticed that there’s a question mark for content removal requests from China. As noted in the map, Chinese officials consider censorship demands as state secrets, so we cannot disclose that information at this time.
Another inexplicable thing that Google does, despite the ability to disaggregate numbers they crunch with all the brainpower and technical capacity they have, is say they can't capture certain data:
Similarly, if a governmental agency used a web form to demand removal of content, we generally have no way of including those reports in our statistics.
and:
Our policies and systems are set up to identify and remove child pornography whenever we become aware of it, regardless of whether that request comes from the government. As a result, it’s difficult to accurately track which of those removals were requested by governments, and we haven’t included those statistics here.
That's all very political, because they could be supplying this information if they had the will.
All in all, it makes for fascinating reading, with things like this:
We also received a demand in late 2009 from a Canadian politician for the removal of a blog criticizing his policies. Again, we declined to remove the blog, because it did not violate our policies.
For example, in May we received a request from a local ministry in
Kazakhstan to remove the YouTube channel for a TV channel supportive of
the opposition. We did not comply.
Note that Google completely chickened out and did not include requests for copyright theft on YouTube. Shame on them!
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