Soon, you may end up eating your virtual words. The ‘Big Brother’ is watching! The government has upped its surveillance on the cyber world, with reports of rapidly increasing security and intelligence agencies’ requests to peep into web users’ accounts and browsed data records.
Internet giant Google has revealed in a transparency report that Indian agencies made requests to hand over 13 user data linked to 20 user accounts per day, during 2012.
Latest figures also show a marked worldwide increase in requests for web users’ data from countries like the United States, Germany, India and Brazil.
Indian agencies made 4,750 user data requests associated with 7,573 user accounts for Google and YouTube till December 2012.
During the same period, France sent 3,239 requests, Germany made 3,083, UK sent 2,883 and Brazil made 2,777 requests, seeking individual user data.
In terms of the number of requests for web user details during 2012, India is next to only the United States, which made 45 requests a day — a total of 16,407 requests to Google in 2012.
Though other countries like France, Germany and the UK increased the number of requests sent to Google, the US retained the top spot for spying on Internet users.
Google says it complied with at least 66 per cent requests forwarded to it by Indian agencies between July and December 2012.
Interestingly, the Central government struggled to contain communal hatred that was spread through the social networking sites against people from the Northeast during the same period.