Google Inc., the owner of Brazil's most-used online community site, may face a criminal probe for distribution of child pornography and racist materials by its users, lawyers for the attorney general said.
A recent article reported that the lawyers, claiming Google failed to comply with a court order to turn over information on where the material comes from, said they will ask a federal judge to authorize a police investigation of the Mountain View, California-based company's Brazilian unit. The service, Orkut, is being used to violate Brazilian law, said prosecutors Sergio Suiama and Karen Kahn.
''Orkut has become a paradise for pedophiles, who solicit sex with childen and distribute pornographic material,'' Kahn said at a news conference in Sao Paulo.
Google, the world's most-used search engine, and News Corp. face growing pressure from law enforcement on the use of its services for some explicit content and the risk of exposure to sexual predators to teenagers and children who post their profiles and diaries on MySpace.com in the U.S. and Orkut in Brazil.
The article said that in a letter to prosecutors yesterday, Google said its Brazilian unit bears no responsibility for the content of Orkut, the biggest social networking service in Brazil with about 8 million Brazilian users. The unit's lawyer, Durval de Noronha Goyos Jr., said all data on Orkut is hosted on servers in the U.S., which are managed by Google Inc. Any request for information from Google must be directed to the parent company, he wrote.
David Drummond, Google's development vice president and member of the company's legal affairs board, told Brazilian lawmakers in a hearing on April 26 the company is willing to cooperate with prosecutors in countries where it has operations and that the company has set up controls to prevent offensive content on its service.
Brazilian attorney generals are preparing to file a civil lawsuit against Google's Sao Paulo-based unit to demand the company follow the country's Internet laws and pay a daily fine for failing to obey the court order, Kahn told Bloomberg.com today. Should the company fail to comply, the Public Attorney will seek to close down its Brazilian operations, Kahn said.
Google's shares rose $3.2, or 0.9 percent, to close at $374.50 today.
A U.S. federal judge ruled March 17 Google has to comply with the government's modified request for 50,000 Web addresses, as part of an effort by the U.S. Justice Department to defend a law that would prevent children from viewing Internet pornography, the article continued. The judge ruled that Google, however, didn't have to give the U.S. as many as 5,000 search queries from users, a decision favoring the company, which was seeking to protect privacy rights from its users.
A New York county legislator sued Google on May 4 over claims the company isn't doing enough to block its users from accessing child pornography on the Internet. The lawsuit, filed in New York state court by Nassau County Legislator Jeffrey Toback, seeks to block Google from providing links or advertising to Web sites that display child pornography, said Jeffrey Carton, a lawyer for Toback.
