Received 40,300 govt requests for user data from India: Facebook report

This was 13.3 per cent higher from the January-June 2020 period when India had made 35,560 total requests

Social media giant Facebook had said it has received 40,300 requests from the Indian government for user data in July-December 2020 period.

The US based company in its Facebook's latest Transparency Report released on Thursday said that request from Indian Government in second half was
13.3 per cent higher the January-June 2020 period when India had made 35,560 total requests.

The company also said that it restricted access to 878 pieces of content in India on the directions of the Union ministry of Electronics and Information Technology in second half of 2020. These are mostly related to security of the state and public order for violating Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000,

“Of these, 10 were restricted temporarily. We also restricted access to 54 items in compliance with court orders,” Facebook said in the report released on Thursday.

The Centre made 40,300 total requests in the July-December 2020 period, of which 37,865 were legal process requests and 2,435 were emergency disclosure requests. The number of total requests made by India ranked second to the US, which had made 61,262 requests during the July-December 2020 period.

The social media company said it complied with 52per cent of the India requests. In the case of the US, Facebook complied with 89per cent of the requests.

On complying the request, Facebook said, "Each and every request we receive is carefully reviewed for legal sufficiency and we may reject or require greater specificity on requests that appear overly broad or vague."

As per the Community Standards Enforcement Report, which was also released, content actioned on adult nudity and sexual activity increased to 31.8 million in first quarter of 2021 from 28.1 million pieces of content in the preceding quarter.

The report found that prevalence of hate speech content was between 0.05 per cent and 0.06 per cent of views in the first quarter of 2021, which marks a decrease from the fourth quarter of 2020.