September 21, 2010 - Governments interact with Google on a regular basis, and this has been known to make both privacy groups and users nervous. To address those fears, Google has taken the unusual step of broadcasting when its service is interrupted or a government requests information.

A simple site called the Google Transparency Report has been established to relay this information. On it, there's one page each to cover government requests, traffic, and frequently asked questions.

To start from the top: a post on the Official Google Blog explained, "In April we . . . created a website that shows the number of government inquiries for information about users and requests for Google to take down or censor content. Today we're updating this interactive Government Requests map with data from the first six months of 2010. We've also updated our analysis of the trends we saw across the data over the past six months."

The post also stated, "Google's services occasionally experience traffic disruptions. Our new traffic tracking tool helps us and others track whether these interruptions are related to mechanical outages or are government-induced. Each traffic graph shows historic traffic patterns for a given country and service. By showing outages, the traffic graphs visualize disruptions in the free flow of information, whether it's a government blocking information or a cable being cut."

This should help address rumors that Google's gotten overly cozy with different governments.

At the same time, Google isn't sharing so much information that it should endanger an ongoing criminal investigation or anything like that