So Which Nation Asks for Most Material To Be Removed From Google?

On a regular basis Google publishes statistics the requests for removing information from Google products from courts and government agencies around the world. This is sometimes successful, but other times Google refuses to take action. For the six months up to the end of 2015, let's look at the requests. For this we will the number of successful requests against the total number of request, and the number of items to be removed [graph][Web page]:

We can see that Russia, followed by Turkey and the USA and Brazil were the top requesters, while Russia was the most successful in removing content. Now if we plot the number of court orders against the total number of requests, we see a different picture, where Turkey had many more court requests, and Russia had much less [graph][Web page]:

When we look at order from other sources, such as Executive Police orders, we see the UK appearing with a relatively high rate of requests, and a high success rate [graph][Web page]:

So which country has most requests to Google for information on users? Well if we plot the number of data requests against legal process (and the number of user accounts as a colour) [graph][Web page], we see that Germany has the most legal requests, but the USA has the greatest usage of subpoenas:

The only country with wiretap orders is the USA:

Conclusions

The life of a digital investigator is becoming increasingly difficult, especially as much of our information is stored within the public cloud. There is thus an every increasing demand from investigators to release information from Google, and also for information to be removed.