Government Censorship? Google’s Got Your Back
There’s a lot of crazy stuff going on in the world right now. Look no further than the Occupy ___ (fill in the blank) protests taking place all around the world. While I don’t want to get into any political debates (this is after all, only an Android blog), many of these protesters have been capturing videos of alleged police brutality using their Android powered handsets and quickly uploading them onto YouTube.
If you think the U.S. government and various law enforcement agencies are happy about this, well — they’re not. Apparently, Google has received over 757 content removal requests for items on Google’s servers from services like YouTube. The information was revealed as part of Google’s biannual Transparency Report. Google’s said in their report,
We received a request from a local law enforcement agency to remove YouTube videos of police brutality, which we did not remove. Separately, we received requests from a different local law enforcement agency for removal of videos allegedly defaming law enforcement officials. We did not comply with those requests, which we have categorized in this Report as defamation requests.
I should note, although these requests occurred between January and June (before many of the Occupy protests), I imagine these take down requests will sky rocket after some of the things I’ve seen today posted to YouTube. Say what you will about Google, when it comes to government censorship, it’s nice to see they’ve got our back.
[TheRegisterUK via Gizmodo]