Google registered an uptick of nearly 1,600 complaints in March 2022 as it received a total of 31,699 complaints, according to a compliance report published by the search giant. The company had notably bucked the trend of increasing complaints in February 2022 (30,065 complaints) by disclosing 3,000 fewer complaints compared to January 2022 (33,995 complaints). 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 report does not include requests made by the government. The March 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 revealed in the report. [caption id="attachment_161232" align="aligncenter" width="247"] Source: Google[/caption] A majority of these complaints (97.3 percent) concern copyright issues alleging infringement of intellectual property rights. Moreover, the company also saw complaints over trademark violations (260 complaints) and defamation (186 complaints), among other things. Google received 285 complaints under 'Other Legal' category in March 2022. The company did not expand on what kind of compaints are included in the category except that it features everything not already mentioned in the report. The compliance reports help in developing an understanding of how major social media companies deal with grievances. They also shed light on issues an average internet user in India grapples with and the action taken by the platform to address these issues. Snapshot of…
