Google released the latest update to their half-yearly Transparency Report today, something I’ve reported on previously. The Google data lists the number of “user data requests” per country, but what it doesn’t do is break it down per head of population.
Doing that breakdown gives depressing results. The UK had slipped into second place behind Singapore in terms of the number of requests per citizen, but as of the latest data – covering the second half of 2011 – we’re back on top. The table below shows the top ten countries, with the number of user data requests per million population. For comparison, I’ve also included the rankings of each country appearing in the top ten for the last couple of years since Google’s records began.
| Rank |
Country | Requests | 2011 H1 | 2010 H2 | 2010 H1 | 2009 H2 |
| 1 | United Kingdom | 23.5 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 2 |
| 2 | France | 21.5 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 |
| 3 | United States | 20.4 | 4 | 5 | 4 | 5 |
| 4 | Singapore | 20.1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 4 |
| 5 | Australia | 19.8 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 8 |
| 6 | Germany | 17.4 | 8 | 7 | 8 | 11 |
| 7 | Italy | 14.0 | 6 | 6 | 6 | 6 |
| 8 | Portugal | 13.8 | 7 | 9 | 10 | 13 |
| 9 | Norway | 9.8 | 28 | 26 | 22 | 22 |
| 10 | Taiwan | 9.7 | 15 | 16 | 13 | 22 |
You can download the raw data (CSV) used to calculate this from the google figures too.
Remember, this is before the latest government plans come before parliament. We would probably drop off the charts completely if this legislation were to go through as they would no longer have to ask google for the data: The ISPs would be forced to do the snooping instead.
From the country that records all telephone conversations on the off-chance that the police want access to them, this does not surprise me.