Google’s Brazilian subsidiary on Wednesday handed over information on more than 3,000 of its users to a Brazilian senate panel investigating pedophilia.
Felix Ximenes, Google’s communications director, delivered a set of DVDs containing information on 3,261 users of the company’s popular Orkut social-networking service for an investigation into the spread of child pornography on the site.
“With the information we have received, we will be able to strike a major blow against the pedophile network acting in the country,” Senator Demostenes Torres said.
The information contained in the Orkut albums will be analyzed by prosecutors and federal police, Torres said.
Google will meanwhile use filters to prevent the spread of child pornography on Orkut, Ximenes told reporters.
Federal prosecutors last August said Google failed to comply with requests to provide information about users who allegedly spread child pornography and hate speech against black people, Jews and homosexuals on Orkut.
Google eliminated the users from Orkut groups and until now has refused to release information about them to authorities, arguing it was bound by US laws guaranteeing freedom of speech.
A Google spokesperson directed questions about why the company changed its position to the legal department, which couldn’t be reached for comment late on Wednesday.
“Google Brasil not only believes it is its obligation to collaborate with Brazilian authorities, but it has already been doing so spontaneously and proactively since the first signs of problems with Orkut were discovered about two years ago,” Latin America spokesman Alberto Arebalos wrote in an e-mail.
About 55 percent of the 60 million-plus Orkut users worldwide are Brazilian.
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