Google Transparency report reveals Govt. demanded omission of 358 items

Whether freedom to speech and expression really exists in the online space in India, is now debatable, after Communications and IT Minister, Kapil Sibal instructed Facebook and Google to monitor their content. Sibal's demands to Google and Facebook to hire censor police to their existing teams to filter out content has met with mixed reactions. While Facebook agreed to omit any sensitive content from their platform that could cause any unrest. Now, Google Transparency Report reveals that during the period of June-January 2011, the Government of India had asked Google to get rid of as many as 358 items, in all, across its services like YouTube, Orkut, Google Earth, Google Maps, and Panoramio, Blogger and Picasa Web Albums. The report has Google stating of all the 'content removal requests' that Google received throughout the June-January 2011 period, it complied partially or fully to only 51 percent of these requests. Click here for full story