U.S. authorities asked for private details of Google Users

Government surveillance of citizens' online lives is rising sharply around the world, 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 worldwide made 20,939 requests for access to personal data from Google users, including search results, access to Gmail accounts and removal of YouTube videos.

"This is the sixth time we've released this data, and one trend has become clear: government surveillance is on the rise," Google said in a blogpost.

U.S. authorities asked for private details of Google users on 7,969 occasions, up from 6,321 in the last reporting period. The number is more than a third of the 20,938 requests for users' details worldwide. Google fully or partially complied with 90 percent of those requests.

According to the Guardian, Europe now accounts for five of the top 10 countries making requests for user data. France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the U.K. are all in the top 10 in terms of numbers of requests. The number of requests for content removal in the U.K. shot up 98 percent in the UK and 60 percent in Spain.

France and Germany, two countries that have pressed hard for more privacy online, made the most requests out of any European countries in this reporting period. Google complied with fewer than half of all requests in both countries.

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