Although Google is trying to do the right thing concerning its users' right to privacy, the Brazilian government appears to perceive this as protecting individuals who are breaking the law.
Orkut's popularity in Brazil is akin to that of MySpace in the US and UK, but the network has increasingly come under the spotlight due to suspicions of its involvement with drug trafficking, child pornography and other organised crime. In May a human rights commission presented evidence of illicit activity on the site which convinced Google to shut down some pages which contravened their own terms of service.
In their defence, Google Brazil has pointed out that the authorities have made the requests to their local offices, which are mainly a Sales and Customer Service operation, rather than to Google in the US, where the servers that host the Orkut information are housed, and that they have cooperated as far as possible with the investigations.
This is the latest in an ever growing series of problems facing search engines. The information and data that they hold concerning their users is of a very delicate nature, the AOL blunder of naively publishing users 'anonymous' data which could easily be traced back to the users being one of the more recent, high profile examples.
One thing that makes this even more complicated for the search engines is that, as they expand to other areas of the world, they fall under the jurisdiction of governments with very different takes on the situation. Whilst the US government's attempt to get their hands on user data from Google failed earlier this year (which would probably only have revealed that George Bush spent most of his term in office Googling his own name and 'fictional' countries) the result was different for Yahoo! when the Chinese government came knocking last year. Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist, was sentenced to ten years in prison after Yahoo! provided evidence at the government's request which showed that he had forwarded an email to foreign websites containing a "top secret" government warning. Yahoo! responded with the following statement:
"Just like any other global company, Yahoo! must ensure that its local country sites must operate within the laws, regulations and customs of the country in which they are based."
This sets a dangerous precedent, and should the Chinese government ask the same of Google, one may wonder whether they would be able to rebuff the demands as successfully as they did in the US, where freedom of speech is a right and opinions are not as closely monitored for signs of dissidenting behaviour.
In Brazil though, it remains to be seen if Google's defence, that the servers are in the US, will prevent any serious action or if the threat of legal action will persuade Google to part with users' private data.
