Indians Rank Second For Online Snooping

The blog post was published in Indolink on November 23, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

India recorded for 2,319 requests for the entire period of 2012, where various government agencies have been looking for individual user details contained in online records, as reported by Dailybhaskar.com. U.S. topped the list with 7,969 requests, while Brazil was on the third spot with 1,566 requests.

It was seen that in the first six months this year, India made 2,319 requests involving 3,467 users, while the U.S. made 7,969 requests in the same period. Globally, it was seen that there were 20,938 requests for user data in the period of January-June. The data includes an individual’s complete Gmail account, chat logs, Orkut profile and search terms among others. Google prepares this report every six months, and was started in July-December 2009.

The report also stated that the percentage of data requests fully or partially complied with by India stood at 64 percent.

The Director for policy at Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Pranesh Prakash said "Though India is a large country with a significant number of internet users, this data is nonetheless an indicator of growing surveillance," as reported by Daily Bhaskar.com.Apart from snooping on user details, Indian authorities are also known to send requests for taking down certain web content, which is considered to be sensitive for national security or defamatory in general. A new trend also revealed that untrue court orders are being used as a key instrument for the same.

On one hand the nation is seeking to go net savvy, while on the other hand authorities are looking to stamp authority on freedom of a larger population.

If was also noted that there were 20 court orders and 64 requests from executive/police that resulted in 596 items being taken down from the web between January and June this year. Comparatively, there were only eight court orders and 22 executive/police requests in January-June 2010, resulting in 125 items being taken down.

Google said “In response to a court order, we removed 360 search results. The search results were linked to 360 web pages that had adult videos, which allegedly violated an individual’s personal privacy,” as reported by Business Standard.