Google gets request to remove political content from India

Google has come up with a detailed report on the governments across the world seeking removal of content from its online services such as YouTube, Blogger, Orkut, Google+ and others. In its India-specific report, Google says it received 2,540 such requests from the Indian government and courts during the period between July and December 2012.

In a blogpost, Google Legal Director Susan Infantino said, "Judges have asked us to remove information that's critical of them, police departments want us to take down videos or blogs that shine a light on their conduct, and local institutions like town councils don't want people to be able to find information about their decision-making processes." 

Google was also asked by Kashmir’s Cyber Crime Investigation Cell to take off current depictions of the disputed Kashmir in five Google Maps domains other than maps.google.co.in.
Between January and June this year, Google received 3,846 government requests to remove 24,737 pieces of content, an increase of 68 per cent over the second half of 2012. 

These officials often cite defamation, privacy and even copyright laws in attempts to remove political speech from Google's services. 

“The number of content removal requests we received from India increased by 90% compared to the previous reporting period,” the company said in a statement.

The company had launched its first Transparency Report in 2010 to provide evidence of how laws and policies affected access to information online. 

"While the information we present in our Transparency Report is certainly not a comprehensive view of censorship online, it does demonstrate a worrying upward trend in the number of government requests, and underscores the importance of transparency around the processes governing such requests," she said. 

''We did not change our depiction of the borders in response to this request,'' Infantino said in the company's official blog.

Tech firms, including Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo!, have been seeking to release more information on Government data requests, in the belief that this would reassure their customers. 

These companies have also expressed "serious" concerns about monitoring of content by government agencies and they have also beefed up encryption (security) of user data to protect privacy of their consumers.