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Google Brazil Pressured to Give Up Names
Kordau writes "Google Brazil is under pressure to release user info from Orkut, relating to a child porn investigation by the Brazilian government. Google Brazil maintains that the info officials want is held on US servers and if they want the info, they should talk to Google USA."
I think they should have to cough it up, if they want to do business in brazil.
in the US, a us branch of a large company gets slammed with multiple subpeonas and searches and requests for eveything the DA can arrange to harrass the US branch (and ultimately the parent company) of a multinational when they want data held outside the country.. and in some cases, it's justified and the only leverage for a necassary investigation.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
... they'll be hurting Brazil a lot more than they'll be hurting Google.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Heh, the country with a sex tourism trade that will probably have a penis-shaped museum certainly couldn't be more porn-friendly than the fundamentalist US. Regardless, being porn-friendly does not equate to being child-porn-friendly.
Since the data on the Google platform is mirrored around the globe for performance reasons, I'm not so sure Google is telling the truth here. I'm pretty sure the regular Google web index is mirrored in some Brazil data centre, and with Orkut having its major market share there too, I would assume that this data that is requested is already there, too.
Orkut was amazing... for about two weeks. I loved it. Our entire friend group jumped in, started making communities, and generally became very active. There was lots of discussion, and everyone was very happy with it.
;^)
Then, the Brazilians came.
My inbox slowly flooded with Portugese spam, mostly asking to be my friend. All of the communities I frequented filled with Portugese spam, mostly asking me to join other communities. They ignored the "language" preferences on communitues and overran practically every non-Portugese group. They constantly spammed one another. Many times, it was just two people having a private conversation with one another, but for whatever godforsaken reason sending this conversation to EVERYONE ON THEIR FRIEND LIST AND EVERYONE ON ALL OF THEIR FRIENDS' FRIEND LISTS!
They completely took Orkut over in the space of a month. It was impossible to use the service if you didn't speak Portugese. They'd email me constantly asking me to join their friend lists and communities. It got so bad I had to remove all of my contact information from the site.
It's not that they used their native language. I'm cool with that. You're free on the Internet to speak whatever language you want. The problem was they ignored and trampled everyone else, filling English-only boards and spamming constantly.
That's my Orkut story. Seeing it in the news again reminded me of the potential, and of how annoying Brazilians can be online
I wonder if anyone outside of Brazil even uses Orkut anymore.
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It's not that simple. People are used to create a kind of a second life in Orkut-like websites. They use it to deal, explore and (why not?) have fun with their "deep & personal & non-acceptable" feelings. It goes from food to sex (sometimes both) and it can be as simple as a star trek addiction. But you have the extremely dark side of it, in this case the child porn. Google has the ability to unveil each and every single Orkut user, including what they use to search for in Google Search. Child porn is a crime. Those involved should have their privacy broken. But that will make clear to everyone that their secret passion for licking foot toes can also be unveiled. Will Google allow that?
The cases are extremely similar in that they highlight the risks of internet companies *HOLDING* that data.
Personally, I think it's not that bad for AOL to have released the relatively limited data they had; and I think it's not that bad for Brazil to be going after actual criminals with whatever tools they have available.
The problem IS the slippery slope of governments getting search data.
- Do you want the current administration getting the emails of the Democratic Party's campaign strategists (and remember, if they get to skim all data from AT&T, they can have it) --- I know Republicans who honestly think the greatest threat to national security is if the Democrats win, so it's not too far-fetched.
- Do you want China to get all the search records of the Falun Gong and Tibeten and Taiwanese leaders; just because they pass a law that says they can?
If they cared at all about privacy Google and AOL should not be keeping this data at all.This country doesn't need to be very big. It just needs to have room for some enormous data centers. Everything would be based here, and countries like Brazil or the US would have no say in what's being hosted on the servers based there.
Then, there would be no such thing as Google having to succumb to government pressure.