Government surveillance of citizens' online lives is rising sharply, according to Google's latest report on requests to remove content and hand over user data to official agencies.
In the first six months of this year, authorities made 20,939 requests for access to personal data from Google users, including their search results, access to Gmail accounts and removal of YouTube videos.
In the last six months of 2009, when Google first published its transparency report, there were 12,539 requests. Authorities made 1,789 requests for Google to remove content in the first half of 2012.- (Copyright: Guardian News & Media 2012)