Google Assists In Arrest Of Indian Man

An anonymous reader writes "After a Google user posted a profane picture of the Hindu saint Shivaji, Indian authorities contacted Google to ask for his IP address. Google complied. He was arrested and is reported to have been beaten by a lathi and asked to use the same bowl to eat and to use in the toilet. Not surprisingly, Google is a keen to play this down as Yahoo is being hauled over the coals by US Congress for handing over IP addresses and emails to the Chinese Government which resulted in a Chinese democracy activist being jailed." Readers are noting that these are 2 unrelated cases — the latter is several months old.

Comments

One big difference

[quanticle]

India is a Democracy. China is not.

Google gave IP address. Police bungled it

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Looks like, Google provided the IP address of someone who posted derogatory images of Shivaji to the Indian authorities. They contacted the ISP and they fingered a wrong party. May be they fingered the current holder of that IP address instead of the user at the time of posting.

They got the wrong party and roughly treated the arrested man. The idea is to send the message loud and clear, "we will get the IP address and catch you and mess you up. May this time we messed up the wrong guy, but next time, watch out." That is the logic of the Indian police who think this will reduce such incidents in the future. But what trips them up is that a savvy criminal will know how to hide his tracks, and it will always be the wrong guy who gets nabbed. But it allows the police to pretend they did something. (You might argue defacing Shivaji's picture is not criminal. But given the reaction you typically get from Muslims for defacing images of Mohammad, this reaction by the desis is quite tame. And this is a different argument anyway, nothing concerning Google)

If google had not promised anonymity to Orkut users, then it can't be held accountable. There are bigger villains in the story, the desi police, incompetent desi ISP, desi politics and the desi population in general that accepts this all.

Re:Even the Post Title

[mweather]

No, they actually hate that. They prefer their tribe's name.

Re:Dont be evil

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't exactly see Google trumpeting the damn thing. ... Google, as best as I can tell, has it on two of their pages. How is that "trumpeting it loudly"..? I worked at Google for several years. It is a BIG thing internally. Arguments and debates break out amongst engineers about certain features of software or actions of the company. The people in the company really do care about the idea of doing good and avoiding evil. The problem is that there is a big grey area and they acknowledge that in their debates. Censoring results for Google China was a HUGE debate within the company and they sincerely cared about the issue. They weren't just ignoring the evil of censorship, they eventually came to the decision that the Chinese users would still be able to access google.com to get their uncensored results if they were searching sensitive topics, but if they were just doing mundane searches having a locally served and maintained google.cn would provide those users with a better experience and better search. This way they could follow the laws of the local country, help those people get better information for a large percentage of searches and they would still be able to access the uncensored version of google.com like they had been able to all along. They do care about being good. They want to help people. They also want to make money. Yes, as time goes on, I think they are slipping and getting shady, but a large group of people in the company sincerely care about this aspect of the Google culture.