I am sure many of you know about Twitter and Facebook being banned in Pakistan and if I take you back much further in the past there have been instances of China asking Google to censor the internet. Everytime there is offensive material a government does not always block the access to it but ask the website owners to remove content.
Google often gets many requests from governments for either data to be shared or removal requests. Google with its usual ‘rebellious’ yet ‘mature’ attitude has published statistics of government requests from around the world.
- The stats are quite interesting. Brazil tops both lists of ‘Data requests’ and ‘Removal Requests’
- India comes 4th with 1166 data requests over the last part of 2009. India comes 3rd in with 142 requests of removal of data.
- What is interesting that countries like Germany, UK and US are also the top five of both lists.
There might be a temptation to look at this data and see think that the countries with the highest number of requests have highest amount of restrictions to net freedom.
One interesting name missing from this list is China. The reason is China considers requests for censorship as state secrets and hence its illegal to show the numbers for Google.
So what do you think about internet censorship? I am personally against it but would love to read your views through your comments.