Google recorded a total of 30,065 complaints in February 2022, bucking the trend of increasing complaints by registering fewer than 3,000 complaints compared to January 2022 (33,995 complaints), according to a compliance report published by the company. The tech giant, being a significant social media intermediary, has published monthly reports under the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021. The February figure reflects the total number of complaints received from individual Indian users. “These complaints relate to third-party content that is believed to violate local laws or personal rights on Google's SSMI platforms,” Google explained. A majority of these complaints (96.1%) are related to copyright issues. Moreover, the company also receives requests alleging trademark violation (297 complaints) and defamation (197 complaints), among other things. The report does not include requests made by the government. [caption id="attachment_159296" align="aligncenter" width="237"] Source: Google[/caption] The compliance reports are an indicator of how major social media companies deal with user complaints. They shed light on issues plaguing an average user and the action taken by the platform to address these issues. Removal actions taken by Google Google took action against 93,067 items based on the complaints received by it. The company explained that a URL in a single complaint is considered an individual "item" so a single complaint may highlight multiple URLs. This is why the action taken by the company is thrice the number of total complaints. [caption id="attachment_159297" align="aligncenter" width="222"] Source: Google[/caption] Given that there was a drop in…
