Government Mining
Posted on: 11/16/2013
The U.S. and other countries have become increasingly more aggressive in their attempt to mine users personal data from the internet. They send requests to companies such as Google, Microsoft Corp., Facebook Inc., and Yahoo Inc. looking to monitor email communications, personal data, and search queries made. Most companies agreed with the requests made, but recent trends show decreased compliance rates and big names like Google Inc. are beginning to question the legal justification of the amount of requests made and rejecting them.
Being one of the most popular search engines worldwide Google Inc. receives a large amount of the legal requests made by various government agencies. Google also owns the popular video site YouTube, operates email services, distributes Android to mobile phones and states its network has 540 million active users. Numbers collected from a six month period showed almost 11,000 requests from the U.S. alone and over 25,000 worldwide.
“And these numbers only include the requests we’re allowed to publish,” wrote Richard Salgado, Google’s legal director of law enforcement and information security.
