Bangalore: India is just behind U.S. globally in requesting for accessing the private details of its online citizens, says the latest transparency report from Google. The report lists out the requests Google received from various governments across the world for getting private information including the Gmail accounts, chat logs, search terms, Orkut or Google+ profiles of its users.

"This is the sixth time we've released this data, and one trend has become clear: government surveillance is on the rise," Google senior policy analyst Dorothy Chou said.

In the first half of 2012, India made 2319 requests compared to 7,969 requests made by U.S., which is first in the list. Brazil is third in the list with 1566 requests. According to Google, there were 20,938 requests globally during the same period. Considering India, the number of requests for user data had doubled over period of 2 years. The requests include court orders as well as from police or officials.

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According to Pranesh Prakash, the policy director at Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), a Bangalore-based organization looking at issues of  internet freedom and openness, who responded to TOI, “Though India is a large country with a significant number of internet users, this data is nonetheless an indicator of growing surveillance. India lacks a general privacy law that helps set guidelines for such user requests, despite privacy being a constitutional right as part of the right to life.”

The country is also active in requesting the take down of contents which belongs to the “inflammatory” and “threat to national security” category. "The government does not always specify the reason for which they want access. They just want access, what they do with the information is not known to us," said a legal adviser of an MNC to The Times Of India. "These requests come with a threat to our continued operation in India," he continued.

The search giant began releasing its transparency report in 2010, which will be updated every six months. It is a part of its effort to highlight censorship and promote the ‘Open Internet,’ which is supported by many other firms.

"We think it's important to shine a light on how government actions could affect our users," Chou said in a blog post.