Google Gives In, Again… This time to Brazil with Orkut data
by DT - September 6th, 2006 9:41 am
By turns the ruling giant Google appears disappointing or downright traitorous – at least to believers in the internet as a tool for democracy.
Not content with appearing to kow-tow to Chinese authorities in return for operating within their Communist/Capitalist totalitarianism, and in the US kow-towing also to the FBI in its efforts to track users’ searches (in the interests allegedly of hunting child pornographers) Google this weekend decided to turn over records to the Brazilian government about users of its idiosyncratic service Orkut. This social-networking set of sites in Portuguese quickly found a huge user-base in Brazil. And it’s now, in light of its corporate owners’ collaboration with government, looking very much at risk of losing that valuable base.
Web groups that allegedly encourage racism and homophobia, and other distasteful though not always illegal positions, are known to often use Orkut, as they would since they want to reach a lot of young Brazilians. And The Brazilian government is investigating them. To do so they obviously want records and Google evidently believes, hewing more to local laws and conventions than to anything as business-threatening as its own home-country’s constitutional First Amendment, believes it’s just fine to cooperate.
It does seem, incidentally, that the nasty groups are limited at least to nasty opinions and not acts. But because even their views open them up to possible prosecution under Brazilian law, the government wants their Internet Protocol addresses, e-mail addresses and other personally identifying information that is given whenever anyone signs up for Orkut. Under the not-terribly-onerous throat of being fined up to $23,000 a day, Google agreed to comply.
And in trying to excuse this compliance, Google has opted for some mealymouthed sophistry that’s simply not worthy of the “do no evil” image the service once tried to cultivate.
“What they [the Brazilian authorities] are asking for is not billions of pages”, said Nicole Wong, Google’s associate general counsel. “In most cases, it’s relatively discrete – small and narrow.”
If you’re a Brazilian who’s thrown in the slammer because of posting something offensive on a discussion site, you might just acknowledge that it could be a narrow matter, but not that its small one.
Internet technology being what it is, users are fighting back. New services are mushrooming aimed at foiling official efforts to attach individuals’ identities to their supposedly anonymous Web activities. There have been “anonymizers” for a while now who provide fake IP addresses, and there is one new piece of software called “Track Me Not” that sends search engines nonsensical queries at random, just to confuse any organized probe trying to attempts to analyze users’ data.
“Track Me Not” was developed by New York University associate professor Helen Nissembaum and Daniel Howe, of the NYU Media Research Lab, as a Firefox extension.
“We are disturbed by the idea that search inquiries are systematically monitored and stored by corporations like AOL, Yahoo!, Google, etc. and may even be available to third parties,” they write on a site explaining their software.
The mechanisms may be very high-tech and of the moment – but the principles involved, and the back-and-forth struggle over them, go right back to 1644 and poet John Milton’s robust defense of a free press in “Areopagitica”. For the original true believers in the Web as a democratic engine, the latest Google betrayal may seem more like Milton’s “Paradise Lost”.
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