Google has hit out at state attempts to clamp down on the internet by revealing governments' requests to remove data from the web and get information about users. Tonight it released a web page with a map showing country by country where it has had government requests or court orders to remove content from the YouTube video service or its search results, or to provide details about users of its services.
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A Google spokesman insisted that the timing of the release was coincidental with the privacy complaint in a joint letter from data protection authorities from the UK, Canada, Israel, France, Spain, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Germany and the Netherlands. "We've been working on this for months and months," he said. But the criticism over Google's data practices, and Street View and Buzz in particular, led data protection authorities to call on Google to collect "only the minimum amount of personal information needed" for a service and to make it clear how that information will be used, as well as offering "privacy-protective default settings", ensure personal data is adequately protected, and make it easy for people to delete accounts.

Google is coming under increasing pressure from governments to reduce the amount of data that it keeps about its users, and to reduce the length of time that it stores it. The data provided do not include requests from normal non-governmental users such as individuals or companies for the removal of content such as pictures, blogposts or YouTube videos. Those would probably be many orders of magnitude greater: there are thousands of "user flags" of inappropriate or misused content on YouTube videos alone every month.