"It may be easier than you think for government entities to demand the private data you've stored on Google's servers," says Andy Greenberg at Forbes. In its latest biannual Transparency Report, Google has announced yet another rise in the number of government and law enforcement requests for data on users — anything from web surfing habits to identifying who owns an email account to the content of emails — and for the first time broke down the U.S. requests by how the authorities asked for the information. In the vast majority of cases, officials didn't bother with a search warrant — the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) allows authorities to just issue subpoenas for data that's at least six months old.
The king of search complies with about 90 percent of U.S. government snooping requests, "but Google's willingness to reveal this data in the first place should be seen as a credit to the company's respect for privacy," says Greenberg, and one not shared by its peers — Microsoft and Facebook — or wireless carriers. The government authorities asking to peer into your electronic life don't inspire much confidence, either, says Matt Sledge at The Huffington Post. At a tech panel devoted to investigating how the government obtained the emails exposing former Gen. David Petraeus' career-ending extramarital affair, Google legal director Richard Salgado dropped this "depressing and revealing factoid about how law enforcement is actually using its subpoena and warrant powers to get information" about you: "I can't tell you how many requests we get for Facebook."
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