Oxymoron of the day: User Friendly
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Google hands over data to Brazil
GOOGLE HAS GIVEN punters' personal data to the Brazilian government, because the authorities asked nicely.
The 'might do a bit of evil if we feel like it' outfit seems to have ignored its vow of confidentiality and rolled over when Brazilian senators asked them to hand over details on some suspected paedophiles, as predicted by the INQUIRER.
More than 3,261 password-protected files were stuck in Google's social notworking site Orkut. The authorities were convinced that the files were packed full of kiddie porn and wanted to see.
A member of the senate commission, Demostenes Torres, told Globo television (no really) that coppers believed that Orkut was the place for sexual predators of children to hang out. He was convinced that the files would result in 200 pedophiles being banged up.
Apparently Google has had a few meetings with the Brazilian government about developing a plan to systematically turn over data on punters using Orkut to Inspector Knacker of the Brasilia Yard.
If this goes ahead it would be a 'hard blow' for paedophiles, Torres claimed.
To be fair, Google did not give the data that willingly. The government did threaten it a bit with criminal and civil lawsuits if it did not obey orders. ยต
L'Inq
AP
Tags: Google
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1) Google offices in Brazil are only meant to make some money, they lack a department to deal with legal issues. The brazilian police and now the very government insists that they should talk about laws with them. Otherwise, the government men that think of the children will have to deal with the US offices where they'll never have such power, which will not help them to get more votes in the next election.

2) Google never really cared too much with brazilian authorities requests about crimes involving their online services, and they're only doing so now because they faced a mighty "CPI", which is like a parliamentary committee usually meant to clarify crimes inside the very government, but in fact it only serves to shake public opinion and transfer future votes from one party to another. It's intriguing that they created one to investigate a typical police matter. Maybe the country is now stable enough and don't need that much public administration.

3) Orkut - Google's notworking site that was overwhelmed by brazilians and then forgotten by other countries - is certainly not the only source of pedophilia, but it's the only assured place where authorities can have some results to brag about.

4) Orkut doesn't demand that its users identify themselves in any way. Despite profiles have fields for addresses, phone numbers, etc, it's foolish to assume that pedophiles would provide real data. Also it's a common misconception in Brazil that the IP address is sure bet to trace someone. You know, government people aren't really IT experts.

My 2c is that they will only catch a few of would-be pedophiles that where dumb enough to provide real data and/or swapped kid pictures using their personal ISP account, and the real criminals will migrate to Facebook or Myspace, which brazilian authorities never heard about by the way.