New Legal Problems For orkut

In case you didn’t know, Google has a social network called orkut. 72 percent of its 16 million users* are from Brazil. The rest are Google employees, their friends and some early adopters. MySpace has 100 million members, so orkut is not that far.

There are a lot of nice people on orkut, some of them promote racism, others like to spam the community. There are even some people who love kids there. But the Brazilian prosecutors don’t understand that and ask Google to pay a $61 million fine as orkut has been used “to organize criminal activity and promote child pornography”. They also want information about the users. But Google protects the user information. “We have obeyed all the judicial orders that requested we remove undue content. Some orders demanded that we turn over user information for investigation and we complied,” said Nicole Wong about a previous request.

It’s very sad to see a closed-circle community like orkut closed by a Government. And it’s also very sad to see kids on social networks like orkut, instead of building their education and trying to become better persons. This way, when they’ll get older, they won’t promote child pornography.

* information from the Reuters article. Wikipedia claims there are 26 million users and 66% are from Brazil.

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