The Indian establishments' appetite for user data of social media is growing at a rapid clip, data for last year suggests. Requests from the Indian government and law enforcement agencies for user data from Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have gone up in the second half of 2019.

The transparency report released by Facebook on Tuesday showed that it received 26,698 requests from Indian authorities between July and December 2019 against 22,684 requests between January and June the same year.

Facebook doesn't provide all the data requested by the governments and hence it provided data in 57 per cent cases in six months to the Indian authorities, which is lower than the average global fulfilment of 74.4 per cent.

"Facebook responds to government requests for data in accordance with applicable law and our terms of service. Each and every request we receive is carefully reviewed for legal sufficiency and we may reject or require greater specificity on requests that appear overly broad or vague," the company said in a statement.

According to Facebook, of the total 26,698 requests from the Indian government authorities, 24,944 came through legal process which includes court procedure while 1,754 were emergency requests. Facebook provided data to the authorities in 49 per cent emergency request cases, and 58 per cent legal process cases.

Besides, Facebook also received requests from the law enforcement and government agencies of India to preserve user data of 6,500 accounts during this period. The number of requests for preservation of user accounts in the previous cycle was 3,300.

"We accept government requests to preserve account information pending receipt of formal legal process. When we receive a preservation request, we will preserve a temporary snapshot of the relevant account information but will not disclose any of the preserved records unless and until we receive formal and valid legal process," Facebook said in a statement.

The global trend for governments requesting Facebook user data has also gone up from 1,28,617 requests to 1,40,875 during this period.