India Sent Over 50K Users Data Requests To Meta In H1, Second Most After The US

In the six months between January and June, the Indian government has sent 55,497 users data requests to Meta. Thereby, the country ranked second after the US in seeking users data from the social media giant Meta, as per the company’s transparency report for the first half of 2022.

In the first half of 2021, Meta had received 45,275 requests from the government while the number stood at 50,382 in the second half of 2021.

Meta said that it also restricted access to 23 items in India that were reported by the country’s Election Commission relating to electoral complaints under the Indian Penal Code, Representation of the People Act, including spreading candidate misinformation and promoting sectarian violence. 

“Of these, 19 items were restricted only temporarily (during the designated blackout period),” Meta said in the report.

“We also restricted access to 597 items in response to directions from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology for violating Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, including content against security of the state and public order, and to six items in response to directions from Ministry of Information & Broadcasting for violating Rule 16 of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines & Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021,” it added.

The company said that it also had to restrict access to 71 items due to other court orders.

The report comes at a time when Meta has long been in a tussle with the Indian government over different compliance issues in the country along with other big tech companies.

Recently, the Supreme Court rejected Meta’s plea that challenged the Competition Commission of India’s (CCI) probe into its messenger app WhatsApp for its privacy policy. Moreover, earlier this week, the apex court also listed the case for a final hearing on January 17.

The case is in connection to the CCI probe launched in early 2021 that alleged WhatsApp’s policy updates showed preferential treatment to business accounts. In May last year, the messaging platform had also moved to the Delhi High Court for a stay on the probe.

Complying with the Indian IT Rules, Meta in its September compliance report said that it took action against 33.78 Mn content pieces across Facebook and Instagram platforms in September this year. As per its report, the social media giant took action against 30.7 Mn pieces of content on Facebook in that month.

In its transparency report for the first half of the year, globally, governments’ requests for user data increased 10.5% to 2.4 Lakh from 2.1 Lakh. Of the total volume, the US had the largest number of requests for user data, followed by India, Germany, Brazil, France, and the UK.

Meta received a total of 69,363 requests, it said.

In the recent wave of employee layoffs across tech companies, Meta let go of its 13% workforce, impacting over 11,000 employees globally.