Government Removal Requests

Like other technology and communications companies, Yahoo receives requests from governments around the world to either remove or otherwise modify content from our services based on allegations that it violates local laws, or to review content to determine if it should be removed for inconsistency with a product’s Community Guidelines or our Terms of Service. Whatever the allegation or assertion, we carefully review each request and respond in accordance with our Global Principles for Responding to Government Requests.

Government removal requests by country

For each country listed below, we report the number of Government Removal Requests received during the specified reporting period, the number of items specified in the requests, and the percentage of requests in response to which some content was removed. While we endeavor to make this data as complete as possible, we only include in our numbers requests that we identify as being from a government agency. If a government agency used a Report Abuse link, for example, we wouldn’t be able to identify the party making the request to remove content and would not include that request in our statistics. We continue to work to track these requests.

Country Total requests Total items specified Compliance rate
Argentina 1 26 100%
Brazil 3 5 60%
France 118 610 100%
India 2 11 91%
Italy 3 14 43%
Global Total 127 666

Illustrative examples

INDIA - We received a request from an Indian court requiring the removal of a Yahoo News article containing defamatory and derogatory content about an individual who had been acquitted in a prior case. The article in question was hosted on a website operated by a separate Yahoo entity. Accordingly, Yahoo India Private Limited redirected the issuing authorities to the correct entity responsible for the content.

ARGENTINA - We received a court order from Argentina requiring the de-indexing of several URLs. The URLs led to pornographic and escort websites featuring an individual's name. The order cited the individual's right to privacy and the protection of their personal name and image as the legal basis for removal. Following our review, we complied with the order in question and submitted the URLs to Bing for removal.

BRAZIL - We received an order from a Brazilian court to remove several URLs from our search results. The URLs led to websites illegally offering copyrighted sports content, including both recordings and live streams. Following our review, we submitted the URLs to Bing, our search results provider, for de-indexing.

Download Data for this Reporting Period: CSV