Google is a U.S. company obliged to disclose information to U.S. authorities. Even if these data are stored in Europe.

The U.S. government has access to user data that is stored outside of the United States. Google confirmed that the Business Week . In the past there have been several inquiries by the U.S. government, the authorities hand over data. Google makes no secret of it and regularly publishes its own statistics for such cases. The U.S. government has also empowered to interrogate this data when the affected server is in Europe.


Background of the anti-terror Patriot Act is law that forces all U.S. company specialized for transmission of data to U.S. authorities. This law applies regardless of the location of the data.

In the past , "Transparency Report" Google has announced that authorities had a total of 14 201 times in 25 countries requested user data. Nich in each case is the search engine company with such a request after. In the U.S., according to the latest report in the second half of 2010 more than 90 percent of requests were answered positively.