Indian govt is watching more users online: Google report

India has climbed to second position, after the US, in terms of  government requests to remove or block content, revealed Google in its sixth transparency report covering Jan-June 2012. Within the first 6 months of 2012, there were more than 20,000 inquiries from government entities around the world.

Google’s Transparency Report highlights government’s watch over online lives of users. The US government made the most demands, asking for details 7,969 times in the first six months of this year while Indian authorities requested nearly 2,300 user’s data. Google report adds that it complied with nearly 64 per cent of the requests made by the Indian government. In July to December 2011, Indian authorities had asked for 2,207 user’s data of which Google complied with nearly 66 per cent of the requests made.

Although India’s internet penetration rate of less than 10 per cent is low by global standards, the country is nonetheless home to over 100 million users, placing it third behind only China and the United States as of early 2012.

The latest Google report details that it received 13 court orders and 35 requests from authorities (Police etc) regarding defamation for the removal of 120 items from Google products -- Orkut, YouTube, web search and Blogger. Indian courts also issued nearly 6 orders to bring down 75 items that were labelled as ‘religious offence.’ “In response to a court order, we removed 360 search results. The search results linked to 360 web pages that contained adult videos that allegedly violated an individual's personal privacy,” lists Google.

The items requested by Indian authorities to be removed were primarily from YouTube, Google’s web search and Blogger.

Earlier, a report released by Freedom House, a Washington-based internet monitoring group, had ranked India 39th in Internet freedom. The report emphasised that despite new comprehensive data protection regulations adopted in 2011, the Indian legal framework and oversight surrounding surveillance and interception remained weak with several instances of abuse emerging in recent years. Under the 2008 ITA, intermediaries (websites like Google) in India are protected from prosecution for content posted by third parties, but according to the 2011 rules, they risk losing such immunity if they do not remove the offensive content within 36 hours of notification. Meanwhile, the rules do not provide an avenue for content producers to be informed of the removal or to contest the decision.