07 September 2006 | Author: Alastair Wright

Google backs down over anti-social networking in Brazil

Google has gone down the same slippery road in Brazil as Yahoo! did in China by bowing to threats of daily fines of 50,000 Reals (about $23,000 USD) and agreeing to provide the Brazilian authorities with a "small and narrow" amount of data stored on its US and UK servers relating to its Brazilian Orkut membership.

Nicole Wong, associate general counsel, defended Google's actions by stating: "What they're asking for is not billions of pages. In most cases, it's relatively discrete - small and narrow".

Wong was comparing this instance with the US Justice Department's attempt in August last year to gain access to a "random sampling" of one million internet addresses and search queries from Google. Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL received identical subpoenas and chose to comply by providing anonymous search terms with no personally identifiable information. Google, however, vigorously defended its position of non compliance, successfully on the most part, fearing it could set a precedent for more intrusive future government demands.

In January 2006 Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a non-profit privacy advocate group, predicted that:

"If companies like Google respond to this kind of subpoena I don't see why the next subpoena might not say 'Give us what we asked for the last time - plus a little more'. Google has always been a ticking privacy bomb because Google retains personally identifiable information. Even though Google may intend to protect online privacy, there will be circumstances beyond their control that will place internet users at risk, and they include government warrants, as in this case".

It seems that Rotenberg's prediction has come true less than eight months later, with Google's resistance, as covered in a recent bigmouthmedia article, to the Brazilian Public Attorney's office folding - as detailed in their compliance statement released Friday. While some legal experts feel that Google had no choice other than to comply, most onlookers have concerns about the bigger picture.

Nobody wants to see Orkut, or any social network site, used to spread child pornography or hate speech, but many will feel that Google Brazil should have been given more of a chance to address its own usage issues. Various security improvements have already been put in place such as:

• Hate communities being closed down
• Reporting buttons being built into the system in order to make it easier to report abuse
• Deletion of large number of bogus profiles
• Freeware spamming programmes designed to target orkut blocked
• Community moderators empowered to mass-delete posts and ban problem users
• Multiple submission time delays
• Use of CAPTCHA's to determine whether or not the user is human.

Despite these measures being implemented the authorities in Brazil felt that they still had to force Google's hand, which leaves only one solution available to protect the user - the voluntary deletion of information held by search engines. The fear being that as long as search engines retain data that can identify individuals they will remain information honey pots for those without comparable big-brother databases.

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