Indian govt made over 3,000 requests to Facebook for user info

New York: India placed the second highest number of 3,245 requests with Facebook for data related to its users in the January-June period of 2013, social networking site Facebook has claimed.

The US with 12,000 requests is at the top of the list. Facebook, however, paid heed to only 50 per cent of such requests from India. "Governments make requests to Facebook and many other companies seeking account information in official investigations. The vast majority of these requests relate to criminal cases, such as robberies or kidnappings," Facebook said.

"In many of these cases, these government requests seek basic subscriber information, such as name and length of service. Other requests may also seek IP address logs or actual account content," it said. The UK, Germany and Italy follow the US and India in the list.

The UK made 1,975 requests, Germany 1,886, while Italy made 1,705 requests about user data. France placed 1,547 requests during the period. The UK made 1,975 requests, Germany 1,886, while Italy made 1,705 requests about user data. France placed 1,547 requests during the period.

Facebook said it has stringent processes in place to handle all government data requests. "We scrutinise each request for legal sufficiency under our terms and the strict letter of the law, and require a detailed description of the legal and factual bases for each request," it said.

"We fight many of these requests, pushing back when we find legal deficiencies and narrowing the scope of overly broad or vague requests," it added. Facebook is the latest technology company to release data on how often governments seek information about its customers. Google and Twitter have regularly come out with such data.

Social networking majors such as Facebook and Twitter have also become platforms for activists for raising voice and flaring anti-government sentiments. According to a transparency report by Google, the most requests came from the US, with 8,438 requests for information about 14,868 users in July-September period last year.

India was second with 2,431 requests for data about 4,106 users for the period. Similarly, a recent Twitter's transparency report had shown that US government, which has been in eye of a storm due to the snooping PRISM programme, had the lion's share in user data requests under it between January-June 2013, while India had less than 10 such requests.

(with additional inputs from PTI)