Google received 42 requests for account information from local law enforcement last year. Photo: Jason Borg

Google and Microsoft received some 230 requests for information about local accounts from the Maltese authorities in 2013 and 2014, according to their latest transparency reports.

The requests, which may have been made by the Maltese courts, police or the government, were mostly accepted, and the international communications firms said they had handed over “partial data” for three quarters of the local requests.

Both companies said the information provided was related to transaction of communications rather than the actual messages themselves. This means that rather than the content of messages and e-mails being given to investigators, the companies told about who the messages had been sent to, when and where.

Microsoft operates the e-mail service Outlook, which took over from communications titan Hotmail last year. It also owns video chatting application Skype but is perhaps best known for its Office range, which includes an instant messaging system.

Google, meanwhile, operates a host of communication platforms ranging from Gmail, the most popular emailing service worldwide, to video sharing giant YouTube. It also runs a less popular social media platform Google+.

Not all the requests made over the two-year period were on individual users. In fact the companies’ reports said requests were made for numerous accounts held by the same people.

Google said it had received 54 local requests for data in 2013, related to 60 accounts, a quarter of which belonged to just a handful of users.

Google did not accept the request of a former clergyman who wanted articles removed about alleged sexual abuse

The same was true of Microsoft, which received 90 requests last year related to 96 different accounts.

The companies said that in some requests no data was handed over at all because there was nothing to give. Microsoft for instance looked into 24 locally held accounts last year and found absolutely nothing to hand over to the authorities.

Questions sent to the police for details on the type of information requested had not been answered by the time of writing.

Local authorities are not the only ones contacting the companies. Google said it had received nearly 600 requests to have pages and addresses (URLs) “with a relationship to Malta” removed.

The company said it had cooperated with nearly three-quarters of the requests, 200 of which came from people living on the island.

While the Google report did not explain what kind of individual requests it had received from the island, it gave the example of an Italian woman who had asked for a decades-old article about her husband’s murder, which included her name, to be removed from search results.

While the company accepted this request, it did not remove the search listing of a former clergyman who wanted articles about an investigation into alleged sexual abuse removed.