Indian govt. made 163 requests to Google for content removal in first half of 2013

Google has revealed that the Indian government made a total of 163 requests based on court and police orders for specific content removal from the search engine.

The search giant in its Transparency Report for first half of 2013 has revealed that requests for content removal by governments increased by 68 percent over the second half of 2012.

According to the Express Tribune, India made 16 requests based on court orders and other 147 requests based on police and executive orders and Google complied with 38 percent of the court order-based requests, while the police order-based requests met with 18 percent compliance.

The requests from India included content such as impersonation, defamation, adult content, bullying and harassment, hate speech and national security.

The report said that Pakistan was among the countries that made least number of requests while Turkey ranked maximum, followed by the US.

Google noted that the most consistent trend for content removal over the past four years remains governments asking removal of political content, judges asking to remove information that is critical of them and police departments asking to take down videos or blogs that express their content, the report added.