After being threatened with fines from Brazil, Google has agreed to hand over personal information regarding criminal activities stored on Orkut’s servers.
(Washington Post) “What they’re asking for is not billions of pages,” said Nicole Wong, Google associate general counsel. “In most cases, it’s relatively discrete — small and narrow.”
Google released a statement yesterday saying it was complying with the Brazilian court orders following a ruling Thursday by a Brazilian judge that threatened Google with a fine of $23,000 a day for noncompliance.
Orkut, a social networking site designed by one of Google’s employee’s was facing legal action from Brazil who was furious over Google’s apparent refusal to release info that could identify child predators, racists and those promoting homophobia.
For law enforcement officials, this is a victory over cyber crime, but for privacy experts, this is yet another sign that Google is becoming more evil and a continuing trend of major Internet companies giving into “big government.”
(Hat Tip: MichaelZimmer.org)
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I can see child predators, but racism and homophobia? I guess they’re not big on freedom of speech.
But they have topless beaches so I it can’t all be bad.
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It’s such a fine line between invasion of privacy and using new technologies to help fight crime (or terrorism). In my opinion, if you are searching the internet for child pornography you deserve whatever law enforcement can throw at you. (I often report spam or solicitations on MySpace to CyberTipline and let them take care of it).
I think we’ll see more and more of these issues – lord knows we’ve had enough throw downs over this in the US.