Indian governmental agencies filed a total of 163 requests to remove 714 entries from Google in the first half of 2013, but the company complied to those request only in 20% of the cases, according to the Google Transparency Report the company updated earlier today. While Google honoured 77% of takedown requests sent by government agencies in 2009, this year's rate is the lowest ever since the company started issuing transparency reports. Indian governmental agencies came third, behind US (545 requests and 3,887 entries) and Brazil (321 requests and 1,635 entries) in terms of takedown requests passed out to Google for the period of January - June 2013. It needs to be noted that India made 84 requests to take down 596 entries during the same time phrase last year and a total of 244 requests to remove 3,538 entries throughout 2012. Of all the requests sent by India this year, 147 were by the executive and police, while only 16 were based on court orders. During the same period last year, 64 orders were sent by the executive and 20 by the judiciary and for 2012 as a whole, 58 were sent by the judiciary, while the executive sent 186 requests to Google. More than 30% of all requests sent by governmental agencies were on charges of defamation, followed by religious offenses which added up to 15% all requests sent. Privacy and security (13%), impersonation (9%), adult content (7%), hate speech (3%), bullying/harassment (2%), copyright (2%), government criticism (2%), national security (1%),…
