96% Of Complaints On Copyright: Google Monthly Compliance Report
In its first monthly transparency report, Google said it received over 27,700 complaints from individual users in India about alleged violations of local laws or personal rights in April this year. This leads Google to remove 59,350 content pieces from its platform. Google released its monthly compliance report under the IT regulations that came into force on May 26.
Under the new IT rules, large digital platforms with over 50 lakh users will have to publish their compliance reports every month, detailing complaints received and action taken on them. The report also details a number of communication links or information that Google has removed or disabled access to with automated tools. A Google spokesperson told PTI that the company has a long history of transparency with respect to various requests it receives from around the world.
Google's report also stated that "to allow sufficient time for data processing and verification, there shall be a gap of two months for reporting." The current report does not include data on automatic identification, data related to impersonation, and removals resulting from complaints of graphic sexual content received after May 25, 2021.
About 96 percent of complaints are related to copyright issues (26,707), while 1.3 percent are related to trademarks (357). About 1 percent settled the defamation (275). Other legal requests were 1 percent (272), fakes were 0.4 percent (114) and fraud was 0.1 percent (37).
"All these requests have been examined and incorporated in our current transparency report since 2010," the spokesperson said. “This is the first time we will publish a monthly transparency report as per the new IT regulations and will continue to publish more details as we improve our reporting process for India”.
According to Facebook, it will submit its interim report on July 2 with details of the content it removed between May 15 and June 15. Moreover, it will also release a more detailed report that will come on July 15. Notably, this report will also include details of complaints received by WhatsApp.
