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

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.