The Narendra Modi government’s requests for user data have gone down, not up

Facebook’s recently released transparency report has a great many people in a tizzy. That’s understandable when you look at headlines that scream, “Govt. user data requests are up by 27 percent!” That’s horrifying, isn’t it?

Is it really? Let’s find out.

What’s a transparency report?

Edward Snowden revealed the mass surveillance being carried out by US and European government on its citizens in 2013. Since then, companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft have made it a point to publish yearly “transparency reports” where they tabulate the number of requests for user data that a nation has, well, “requested”.

The data is freely available to the public. Detailed information on these reports isn’t provided and some of these are even muzzled by governments. As a barometer for the state of internet surveillance and censorship however, this data will do just fine.

Since the data is actually available, we went ahead and downloaded Facebook’s transparency report ; but we didn’t stop there. In all, we took the data from the transparency reports of Apple , Facebook, Google , Microsoft and Twitter and compared it to stats from 2013, when the reports first started coming out.

Google hasn’t yet released its transparency report for 2016, but it did have data from 2009-2015 and that’s what we had to rely on. Google does classify the requests as nudity/obscenity, national security, etc., which was very helpful.

Numbers don’t lie

What if I told you that Pakistan’s requests for user data has jumped up by 2000 percent since 2013 compared to India’s 200 percent rise?

Sounds heartening, doesn’t it? And that 27 percent rise doesn’t seem so bad, does it?

However, numbers can lie, but only without context.

Pakistan made only 35 requests for user data in 2013 and around 700 in 2016. India made 3,245 such requests in 2013 and 6,324 in 2016.

India’s figures are much higher. Putting things in context, however, is the fact that Facebook’s user base in India went from 92 million users in 2013 to 195 million in 2016. As a percentage of the user base, the number of requests for user data has actually gone down. It’s not down by much, a mere 3-7 percent, but it’s enough to prove my point. Bolstering this case is the fact that Facebook only complies with around 50 percent of such requests, and even then, not fully.

In fact, I’m quite surprised that the number of requests isn’t scaling exponentially with internet penetration.

If you look at saturated western markets, the US alone accounts for half the global take down requests on platforms like Google and Facebook. Facebook’s compliance rate with requests is also over 80 percent in these countries.

Censorship is going down, not up

Looking at content restriction figures (a.k.a. censorship) on Facebook, the number of government requests have gone down 7 times — from around 15,000 to around 2,000 — since H2 2015 and by about 60 percent since 2014 — from around 5000.

Google’s data from 2009 to 2015 does indicate a rise in censorship. However, even these requests haven’t scaled exponentially. In addition, the majority of requests that Google receives are takedown requests related to nudity, copyright violations and violence. This is quite normal.

Censorship data also suggests that India is way behind its western counterparts, with Germany alone sending out double the number of requests India does. France and the US are in another league altogether.

The data from Microsoft, Apple and Twitter is barely significant. Requests for data from Apple and Twitter don’t even hit the 200 mark. Requests from Microsoft are higher, but these numbered between 500-1000 in the first half of this year.

If anything, we’re not doing enough to take advantage of the wealth of information that the internet can provide us.

India has the second largest population in the world, the second largest Facebook user base and the second largest internet population in the world, and it’s the world’s largest democracy. Is it any wonder that tech companies see such a large number of data requests from our country?

Looking at it from this perspective, India’s internet landscape is very different from the censored, Orwellian picture that everyone loves to paint.