Transparency team travels to Europe

Transparency is a core value at Google and we’ve created a Transparency Report to inform our users in a candid way about the requests for information that we receive from governments around the world. We believe this information represents an essential building block for user trust online.

We are keen to see transparency take off around the world, and for this reason, the Google Transparency team is making its first trip ever this month to Europe. Europe has longer traditions of open, democratic governments than almost anywhere in the world, so we knew it would be useful to meet with officials from both national governments and European Union. During our trip, which started in Amsterdam last week, we’re also talking non-profit groups and think tanks, and evangelizing with the press. Our goal is to invite governments and companies to join us in providing more data about when and why information is suppressed or subpoenaed.

We’re showing our European interlocateurs our Government Requests tool, which records the number of government inquiries for information about users and requests to remove content from our services. Our interactive Traffic graphs also provide information about traffic to Google services from around the world. By illustrating outages, this tool visualizes disruptions in the free flow of information, whether it's a government blocking information or a cable being cut.

In Brussels, we joined the EU Hackathon. This project is designed is to encourage European participation in initiatives such as the OpenNet Transparency Project. It also demonstrate show different sources of data can be used collectively to give a picture of how governments affect access to information.

Our next stop is Stockholm, followed by Warsaw and London. We’re huge fans of Foreign Minister Carl Bildt and we often look to his advocacy on behalf of the open Internet for inspiration as we keep working toward greater transparency.

Posted by Dorothy Chou, Senior Policy Analyst and Transparency Policy Lead