India Second Most Snoopy Country As Per Google's Transparency Report

Google released the latest edition of its transparency report yesterday. It offers a strong message for its users and also details on the types of online surveillance that governments around the world are using.

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The report contains the following 1)Government requests to remove content 2) requests for information about users 3)Requests by copyright owners to remove search results 4)Google Product Traffic 5)Safe Browing

Its common knowledge that no other government makes as many user-information requests as the US does. But guess who comes in at second place. India has been consistently maintain second position behind the United States when it comes to requesting information from tech companies like Google and Apple.

US authorities accounted for 10,918 of the requests during the first half of the year, followed by India by Indian authorities who made 2,691 requests related to 4,161 users/accounts. This is a growth of about 11 per cent since the last Google Transparency Report.

How did Google respond to the Indian requests? It complied with 64 per cent of the requests from the government. "And these numbers only include the requests we're allowed to publish," wrote Richard Salgado, Google's legal director of law enforcement and information security.

In recent times, tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Yahoo have been taking legal action. Their objective is to obtain the right to share more detailed information about the FISA demands made by entities like the National Security Agency, FBI and others.

In response to this, the Obama administration is opposing the transparency-seeking lawsuits. Their take on the matter is that by maintaining that more detailed disclosures, it would make it much harder to sniff out terrorist plans against the US.