Indian Government Data Requests To Facebook Increases By 27%

The Indian government made 45,275 data requests to Facebook in the first half of 2021, compared to 35,560 during the same period last year and 40,300 requests during the second half of 2020, marking a 27.32% and 12.3% increase, respectively. 

According to the Facebook’s transparency report, it produced some data to Indian authorities for a little more than 50% (or 22,865 instances) of all requests. 

Globally, 211,055 data requests were made by government authorities, of which 70% or 149534 were fulfilled. The Indian government made the second-highest number of requests, just behind the United States government, which made 63,657 requests. 

Germany, France and Brazil occupy the third, fourth and fifth positions with 15,554, 13,822 and 12,989 requests, respectively. 

In the first half of the year, the Indian government also made 538 requests for the removal of content that violated local laws, down from 824 during the same period in the previous year. This number is also low compared to countries like Germany, Mexico, Argentina and Pakistan which made 13,876, 9,479 5,552 and 3,262 such content removal requests respectively.

One place where India figures high on the list is for the number of Internet disruptions: Facebook reports 28 different instances of internet disruptions in the country that lasted a duration of over three months. Syria comes in at a distant second with nine such disruptions that had a duration of about two days.

In India, Jammu and Kashmir is the region that faced the highest number of internet disruptions due to state-sanctioned internet shutdowns. Between August 2019 and February 2021, the internet was unavailable for a total duration of over eighteen months.

But India didn’t have the most extensive duration of internet disruption in the world during the period in question. Myanmar faced six internet disruptions that lasted a combined period of close to ten months due to the military coup in the country in February.