Internet search services provider Google Inc, US, has launched an interactive online Transparency Report with tools that allow people to see where governments are demanding removal of content and where Google services are being blocked. According to Google, this kind of transparency can be a deterrent to censorship.
Like all companies, Google's services occasionally experience traffic disruptions. The new traffic tracking tool will help the company and others track whether these interruptions are related to mechanical outages or are government-induced. Each traffic graph shows historic traffic patterns for a given country and service. Graphs are updated as data is collected, then normalised and scaled in units of 0 to 100.
The new tool, which is global and includes China, will replace the Mainland China service availability chart, which showed product access for China alone. By showing outages, the traffic graphs visualise disruptions in the free flow of information.
Earlier, in April 2010, Google created a website that shows the number of government inquiries for information about users and requests for Google to take down or censor content. The company is now updating this interactive Government Requests map with data from the first six months of 2010. It has also updated its analysis of the trends seen across the data over the past six months. The new data for 2010 now includes the number of individual items asked to be removed, per country.
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