With law enforcement agencies often requesting for revelation of private user data, Internet search giant, Google, has added a new online tool that aims at providing greater transparency about the number of government requests that it receives for removal of specific content.

Though the new tool will indicate the number of private data requests that Google has received from government officials of different countries, it will not provide any detailed descriptions of the removed content.

Noting that the new tool will help the company shed light on the practices of governments, as well as on a growing push to block information on the Internet, Google’s chief legal officer David Drummond said: “We at Google believe that greater transparency will lead to less censorship online.”

Drummond further added: “Whenever we can, we notify users about requests that may affect them personally. If we remove content in search results, we display a message to users. The numbers we are sharing today take this transparency a step further and reflect the total number of requests we have received broken down by jurisdiction.”

Saying that the number of governments censoring information has gone up from 4 in 2002 to 40 at present, Drummond revealed that Brazil and the US made the maximum number of requests for private user data during July-December last year - each country asking over 3,000 times for such information on users of YouTube and Orkut.