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."

Comments

fair play and leverage

[way2trivial]

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.

Re:fair play and leverage

[diersing]

How does it differ from Telephone and Bank records being sought by investigators when the telephone or bank are the subject of the investigation?

Re:fair play and leverage

[Amouth]

you have to watch with that... why isn't the phone company an accesory do every drug deal made or arranged over the phone..

they have common carrier status.. as far as i am concerned websites should have it too as they don't discriminate on who can view it.. (if they do then they lose that status)

you have to watch out about having double standards

If the Brazilian government kicks Google out ...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

... they'll be hurting Brazil a lot more than they'll be hurting Google.

Google telling the truth?

[Captain Perspicuous]

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.

I Remember Orkut

[Schezar]

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.

What must be done:

[rice_burners_suck]

I think the free software community needs to get everyone together, along with lots of money and resources, and create a country somewhere in the world that has free software friendly laws.

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.