Google has released a detailed transparency report where they try to provide information about the data requests done by government agencies around the world and content removal done for such requests. If a government find few contents on Google services or products, they request for the item removal or they may request more information on that. Now Google is providing the number of requests for more information asked by the government around the world and item removal requests by them. In terms of data requests, India is on third position after U.S. and Brazil. Indian government requested 1,699 information in six months (July to December 2010) where U.S. government asked for 4,601 and Brazil asked for 1,804. Regarding the content removal from Google products, Indian government asked to remove 282 items by sending around 67 requests.
The removed content on basis of these requests were YouTube videos of hate speech, defamation, pornography, government criticism, web search results and images causing defamation and the removal list is also having blog posts from Blogger causing defamation, privacy security, government criticism and pornography. Some of the content were removed because of the court order and some of them were removed because of the police complaints.
Yes, in India also the court is handling matter of privacy and security, defamation done by bloggers on such blogging platforms. Total 29 blog posts were removed because of court order sent to Google for the item removal from their blogging platform i.e. Blogger. That means, such court orders may come for other platforms as well and you (bloggers) should be ready for such action in case your article comes under such scanner.
Transparency Report for India also states that they received requests for removal of content and YouTube videos which were critical of Chief Ministers and Senior Officials of different states. It’s not clear that which video they are talking about and which Chief Minister or Senior Officials are in question.
Regarding the data requests, as per details most of the Indian government data requests were related to the criminal investigations. They asked for more information about the Google account or may be Orkut account.