According to Google’s latest transparency report published on Thursday, data requests by government agencies have increased by more than 120 percent since 2009 when the company first began publishing the data request reports.
“Though our number of users has grown throughout the time period, we’re also seeing more and more governments start to exercise their authority to make requests,” wrote Richard Salgado, legal director of law enforcement and information security at Google, in a post on the Google Official Blog on March 27.
The ninth transparency report revealed that between July and December 2013, the search engine giant received 27,477 requests for user data as compared to 25,879 data requests received in the first half of last year and 12,539 in 2009.
The United States with 10,574 requests for information on 18,254 accounts topped the list, followed by France with 2,750 requests for about 3,378 accounts and Germany with 2,660 requests for about 3,255 accounts.
The UK stood fourth in the data request list with 1,397 requests for information about 3,142 accounts, followed by Brazil with 1,085 requests for information about 1,471 accounts.
While Google recorded increase in the number of government data requests, Yahoo recorded a significant drop in the number of government requests in the second half of 2013, compared with the first half.
Yahoo said it had received around 21,425 data requests from 17 countries for 32,493 accounts from July 1 to Dec. 31, 2013, with the United States accounting for almost one-third of them.
“We work hard to protect your information from unclear, improper, overbroad or unlawful government data requests,” said Ron Bell, Yahoo general counsel, in a blog post Thursday.
Tech giants including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all have published transparency reports on the overall number of government requests for data.
