New York: Indicating a growing trend of the government surveillance of Internet activities of people and organisations, India sought confidential web user details in as many as 2,319 cases from Google in the first six months of 2012. Besides, the number of items sought to be removed from Google's various internet platforms such as YouTube videos, search results, images and web pages, more than doubled to 596 in the six-month period to June 2012, Google said.
The number of requests for web user details rose by five per cent from those made in the preceding six-month period (July-December 2011), and placed India at the second place after the US in terms of the government requests for user data from Google.
However, Google has declined the Indian authorities' request in about one-third cases. Google said in its half-yearly Transparency Report that it complied with 64 per cent of the total 2,319 requests made by the Indian authorities between January-June 2012.
In July-December 2011, Google had received 2,207 such requests from Indian authorities and had complied with in 66 per cent cases. Besides, Google was also asked by Indian authorities to remove as many as 596 items (including photos, web pages, videos etc) from its various platforms and websites like Youtube, Orkut and Google Images....
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12:04 PM, Nov 15, 2012
New Delhi: Internet users in Kashmir are unable to access Facebook and YouTube. The government had issued orders to Internet service providers to restrict access to the websites. This move is believed to be in response to the protests against the anti-Islam video on YouTube. It was previously reported that the certain URLs with offensive content had been blocked, but it now seems that access to the entire websites have...
12:53 PM, Oct 01, 2012
New Delhi: An analysis of a leaked list of items that were ordered to be blocked by Indian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) on directions from the Department of Telecom bring to light the inconsistencies in India's online censorship efforts. Pranesh Prakash, programme manager at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), analysed the 309 specific items that were asked to be censored from August 18, till August 21, 2012 by...
07:47 AM, Aug 23, 2012
New Delhi: After a spate of attacks on a number of Indian websites and a ground protest event on June 9, that evoked lukewarm response, hactivist group Anonymous Operation India has chosen the Right to Information Act (RTI) as the latest tool in their battle against Internet censorship. Anonymous India is urging Indian citizens to file RTI applications to seek information regarding the correspondence of public servants with Google, Facebook...
03:01 PM, Jun 13, 2012
New Delhi: A hacking group said it attacked the Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL) website, accusing the company of censoring content on the Internet. The corporate website of MTNL, which caters to the major Indian cities of New Delhi and Mumbai, was down for at least six hours. A post on hacking group Anonymous India's blog said the company was attacked because it had blocked several file sharing websites. But...
09:03 AM, Jun 07, 2012
Davos: Ahead of a court hearing, technology giant Google facing controversy in India allegedly for hosting obscene and objectionable content on Thursday made it clear that it is not possible for the company to monitor everything on its website. Google and Facebook are among 21 companies whose executives have been summoned to appear in person in a lower court in Delhi on March 13 for allegedly hosting obscene and objectionable...
10:11 AM, Jan 28, 2012
New Delhi: Politicians and prominent thought leaders on Tuesday took to Twitter to debate Kapil Sibal's remarks on Internet censorship with Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah coming out in support of the embattled Telecom Minister. Abdullah cited the dangers of inflammatory content on social networking websites. "I hate the idea of censorship but have seen for myself how dangerous inflammatory content on Facebook YouTube can be," Abdullah tweeted...
05:26 PM, Dec 06, 2011
London: Governments must not clamp down on Internet and mobile phone networks at times of social unrest, the British government said on Tuesday - weeks after suggesting police should do just that during riots. Foreign Secretary William Hague said the fact that criminals and terrorists can exploit digital networks is not "justification for states to censor their citizens." And Prime Minister David Cameron said governments "must not use cybersecurity as...
04:22 PM, Nov 02, 2011
Beijing/Shanghai: China will intensify controls of online social media and instant messaging tools, the ruling Communist Party said in an agenda-setting document that marks the government's highest-level reaction so far to the explosive growth of microblogs. Beijing's vow to strengthen Internet administration and promote content acceptable to the ruling party appeared in the communique of a recent party leadership conclave published in the official People's Daily on Wednesday. Communiques from...
12:45 PM, Oct 26, 2011
Beijing: A major Chinese online commerce site has banned sales of software used to bypass Internet censorship amid Beijing's efforts to block the development of a Middle East-style protest movement. But Taobao.com, part of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, said it took the action on its own and received no official order. A notice on Taobao.com said virtual private networks and Internet protocol proxies were being used to illegally visit foreign...
04:28 PM, Aug 23, 2011
London: British Prime Minister David Cameron's flirtation with the idea of social media censorship controls after recent riots might only be the beginning. With Western democracies and emerging authoritarian states alike facing new threats from the rise of the Internet and social media, the temptation to try and regain control through censorship may grow. Some experts say such attempts could backfire and jeopardize the legitimacy of governments, fuel fresh unrest...
01:11 PM, Aug 19, 2011
New Delhi: In the aftermath of the London riots, Britain considered tighter controls on the Internet, to prevent social unrest. How good is India at patrolling the web? Nikhil Pahwa, the Editor of www.Medianama.com recently tried uploading his holiday photos from Ladakh to a file sharing site to share it with friends. He couldn't do it because unknown to most of us, Internet Service Providers (ISP), had blocked all file...
05:50 PM, Aug 16, 2011
New York: Eight New York residents sued Baidu Inc and the People's Republic of China on Wednesday, accusing China's biggest search engine of conspiring with the country's government to censor pro-democracy speech. The lawsuit claims violations of the US Constitution and according to the plaintiffs' lawyer is the first of its type. In an unorthodox move it names not only a company but also the Chinese state as defendants. The...
07:30 AM, May 19, 2011
Beijing: China announced a new State Internet Information Office on Wednesday to unify the squabbling agencies that oversee the Chinese Internet, which Beijing views as both a potential gold mine and a political threat. The State Internet Information Office appears intended to help improve coordination and rivalry among the dozen or more Chinese government ministries and agencies with a stake in the Internet. It will be based in the State...
07:34 AM, May 05, 2011
Washington: Some day soon, when pro-democracy campaigners have their cellphones confiscated by police, they'll be able to hit the "panic button" - a special app that will both wipe out the phone's address book and emit emergency alerts to other activists. The panic button is one of the new technologies the US State Department is promoting to equip pro-democracy activists in countries ranging from the Middle East to China with...
12:53 PM, Mar 26, 2011
Hong Kong: Google Inc on Monday accused the Chinese government of making it difficult for Gmail users to access the service in the country, the latest development in a rocky relationship between the two. Google said any difficulty users in China may have faced in the past few weeks accessing its email service was likely to be the result of government blocks, a Google spokeswoman said in a statement. "There...
07:30 PM, Mar 21, 2011
New Delhi: Blogs with the domain name blogspot.com have been reported as inaccessible by users of certain internet service providers (ISPs) in India. Though other blogs powered by Google's Blogger service, but having their own domain names are accessible. The block seems to be currently limited to only a few ISPs, with many users on other ISPs still being able to access blogspot.com freely. Airtel has denied any blocking on...
05:54 PM, Feb 12, 2011
Tehran: Iranians have found their access to major news websites even more restricted than usual as more foreign sites were blocked by a government filter, Reuters witnesses observed on Monday. Yahoo News and Reuters.com, both usually accessible in Iran, were unavailable, joining other long-blocked news sites such as the BBC and social networks Facebook and Twitter as beyond the reach of Iranians using a standard Internet connection. There was no...
11:56 AM, Feb 01, 2011
Washington: The US Air Force has blocked employees from visiting media websites carrying leaked WikiLeaks documents, including the New York Times and the Guardian. Major Toni Tones, a spokeswoman at Air Force Space Command in Colorado, said it had blocked employees whose computers are connected to the Air Force network from accessing at least 25 websites that have posted WikiLeaks documents. The Air Force "routinely blocks Air Force network access...
03:25 PM, Dec 15, 2010
Caracas: Venezuela plans to include the Internet in a law that regulates the media, under a proposed bill presented to parliament on Thursday that the opposition claims will result in censorship. Manuel Villalba, a lawmaker from President Hugo Chavez's Socialist Party, said the law was aimed at protecting citizens. "Nowhere is the restriction of access to the Internet suggested. There should just exist protection of citizens' moral and ethical honor,"...
12:51 PM, Dec 10, 2010
