Miscellaneous > Intellectual Property & Law

Censorship happens

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worker201:
Google has released this thematic map showing which governments are trying to censor the internet.  No surprise - US and UK are at the top of the list.  China, of course, censors their own censorship, so there is no info available for them.  This map shows two separate items.  Requests for removal are when a government agent asks that a website be removed from Google's search database.  And a request for information is when a government agent asks for information about users visiting searching for particular sites or topics.

http://www.google.com/governmentrequests/

Lead Head:
Curious as to whats so sensitive for Brazil.

worker201:
I think a requests per capita might make more sense.  The US has 5x the people and 50x the websites as the UK, but our requests are only 2x.  Doesn't that theoretically mean that England is censoring more than we are?

However, this might make Brazil look even worse, because a much lower percentage of homes have computers there.  I have no idea what's going on down there.  Maybe their porn rules are stricter than ours.

Refalm:
Brazil apparently sues social networking websites a lot to remove fake profiles:
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/google-fined-for-defamatory-message-on-networking-site-20100426-tlwh.html

Brazil has sane pornography laws (18+, no Hustler, etc. magazines in plain sight), so it's not that.

Calum:
by the way, technically an "agent" is not employed by the secret service, but works with them, so actually no agents would be asking for removal of a site, it would be intelligence officers.

And that ends today's lesson in pedantry!

PS - however this confusion seems endemic, just having a look round the internet, so please don't feel like i am making a big issue of it.

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