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The internet works best when users have as much information
as possible.
In this video, we'll show you some tools created by Google
and others that shed light on how your use of the internet
is affected by internet service providers, governments
and other parties.
If you think your connection is unusually slow, there's a
few ways to test it.
One of these is the YouTube speed tester, which measures
your connection speed and compares it to other internet
providers in your area.
For more technical users, the measurement lab, of which
Google is a sponsor, provides tools to collect data about
bandwidth and traffic shaping, which is to say preferential
treatment of some services and websites.
This is easy to do, but it's not
obvious when it's happening.
Now let's say you get an error accessing a website.
Is the website broken or is something else going on?
Google's transparency report can sometimes
answer these questions.
The robustness of the internet varies widely
from place to place.
In the best case, it can survive a terrible disaster,
but in the worst case, one man can take an
entire country offline.
Most blockages, though, affect specific websites rather than
whole countries.
Sometimes the people doing the blocking will tell you what
they're doing, and this transparency is a good thing,
but most of the time you can't tell what's happening.
Herdict.org can help you answer the question, is this
website down for everybody, or just me?
Herdict collects reports of broken websites from internet
users around the world.
By contributing your experience, you can help them
build a complete picture of what's broken where.
Of course, internet users aren't just consumers.
They're also creators.
Google receives many requests to remove content
created by our users.
When we honor these requests, we tell you who made them and
why, whether the request was made by a private party, or by
a government.
You can see the numbers of such requests that we receive
from governments on our transparency report, as well
as what proportion of them we comply with.
When we remove something from Google search results because
of a copyright claim, we tell people that this has happened,
and we tell
chillingeffects.org about the claim.
This helps people study how much data is disappearing from
the internet.
Google also receives requests for user data from many parts
of government, such as courts, police, and so on.
Our transparency report tells you how many, as well as how
much the volume of these requests has
increased over time.
When we receive a request for user data, we check that it
meets both the letter and the spirit of the law.
Whenever possible, we notify users about requests for user
data that may affect them, and if we believe a request is
overly broad, we'll seek to narrow it.
We give you control over the data that we
store on your behalf.
To learn more, visit your Google dashboard.
You can see a summary of all your data, and make an
informed decision about what to keep, and what to delete.
