Indian government at second position after U.S.A for demanding user data from Google

This blog entry was published in WHDI Reviews on November 22, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

This fact came to light in the ‘Transparency Report’ published by web services major. The report covers the time period from January to June in the present year. During this time period, the Govt. of India has asked Google for user information 2,319 times over 3,647 user accounts.

This has been done by the way of court orders and requests made by police. Google has allowed the disclosure of the information sometimes partially and sometimes completely. The U.S.A government on the other hand requested for more information 7,969 requests over 16,281 accounts. The compliance rate by Google to Indian and U.S requests was 64% and 90% respectively. The report gives details about two categories of interactions: firstly to divulge data and secondly to pull down content. India now ranks 7th in the list of countries which had made requests to pull down data. India could have achieved even a better rank but owing to the lack of any constitutional power which backs its action, it has to be satisfied with the seventh position.  According to Pranesh, (policy director with Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society) these requests for pulling down data are an attempt made by the government so that its criticism is not able to reach a wide audience.

Google (which is banned in China) supports the cause of disclosure of the information related to governments. The other net service providers which put out similar transparency reports are twitter, Linkedin and Cloud storage service Dropbox. These content pull down request made by the government is not healthy for a democratic country like India.