Coding with data from our Transparency Report
By Matt Braithwaite, Transparency Engineering Tech Lead
More than a year ago, we launched our
Transparency Report, which is a
site that shows the availability of Google services around the world and lists the number of
requests we’ve received from governments to either hand over data or to remove content. We
wanted to provide a snapshot of government actions on the Web — and in recent cases like
Libya
and
Myanmar,
we were glad to see users start to get back on our services.
Today, we’re releasing the
raw
data behind our
Government
Requests tool in CSV format. Interested developers and researchers can take this
data and revisualize it in different ways, or mash it up with information from other
organizations to test and draw up new hypotheses about government behaviors online. We’ll keep
these files up-to-date with each biannual data release. We’ve already seen some pretty cool
visualizations of this data, despite the lack of a machine-readable version, but we figure
that easier access can only help others to find new trends and make new inferences.
The data has grown complex enough that we can no longer build a UI that anticipates every
question you might want to ask. For example, the Transparency Report doesn’t allow you to ask
the question, "Which Google products receive the greatest number of removal requests across
all countries?" Using
Google Fusion
Tables you can answer that question easily. (The top four are Google Web Search,
YouTube, orkut, and Blogger.)
We believe it’s important to keep providing data to anchor policy conversations about Internet
access and censorship with real facts — and we’ll continue to add more raw data and APIs to
the Transparency Report in the future. So much can be done when engineers and policy wonks
come together to talk about the future of the Internet, and we’re psyched to see the graphs,
mashups, apps, and other great designs people come up with.
To kick things off, we’re sponsoring a forum to demonstrate the power of what can happen when
engineering and policy work together. If you're an EU-based hacker,
we invite you to apply to join us for
an all-expenses-paid hackathon using this data at the EU Parliament in Brussels on November
8-9, 2011.
Matt Braithwaite is the Tech Lead for Google's Chicago-based Transparency
Engineering team. He has a beard (not shown).
Posted by Scott Knaster,
Editor
