A couple of days ago I read an article on the BBC News website about Google releasing their new style Transparency Report which gives details of Government requests for user data as well as the number of Google hosted information items (video, search etc) that were removed by request.

The BBC article starts as follows :

The US government asked Google for user information 4,287 times during the first six months of 2010.

During the same timeframe the UK government put in over 1,000 such requests.

This is just two snippets from Google’s new Transparency Report, a set of tools designed to show censorship levels around the globe.

Civil liberty groups welcomed the tool but called on Google to provide even more detail about the requests.

For the casual and non-inquisitive reader it would appear from that piece that the US Government are leading the game in violating their citizens privacy whilst the good old UK is nowhere near as interested in it’s citizens information.

As someone who is employed to manipulate data all day, the first thought that crossed my mind was that in population terms, the UK cannot be far behind the US with those numbers.

So, with that thought in mind, digging ensued…

A visit to the Google tool provided the following information for numbers of requests by governments for user information by country (request numbers of 50 or less have been omitted) :

Nice to see the UK in 4th place there so nothing to worry about at all – until you factor in the populations of each country that is (ranked by requests per million citizens) :

Well bugger me, look who is at the top now – not that I am exactly surprised given the increasingly police state like nature of the UK when it comes to dealing with its inhabitants.

As an aside, the BBC’s “.. put in over 1000 such requests.” is actually 1343 but that probably did not fit the slant they wanted on the story.