It’s been a while since we’ve expressed our puzzlement at the many conflicting policies of Google in their quest to do no evil while still respecting user privacy. As per usual, we’ll recap all those conflicting policies somewhere in the middle of the post here, but this particular conflict of philosophy is particularly noteworthy. According to the Inquirer, Google’s Brazilian chief Alexandre Hohagen told the Brazilian senate that they’re going to make ‘greator efforts’ to attempt to curb child pornography and racial incitement on their social network Orkut, but would not in any event turn over to officials personal information of their users.
Orkut has some really pervasive market penetration, and over 30 million of the 60 million total users of the service originate in Brazil, making this a very localized problem. Given that I’m not Brazilian and an active user of the site, I’m not particularly exposed to the level of child porn trading going on. On the other hand, a cursory scan through some active profiles shows several instances of folks begging child porn traders not to contact them publicly in the About Me section - indicating that it’s a fairly common occurance.
It’s curious, though, that Google Brazil is taking the stance here not to turn information of criminal activity over to the government, where as in Egypt, Google’s YouTube more than willingly complied with Egyptian authorities in pulling down several videos exposing local police brutality and corruption. Then there was the incident back in November in Israel when Google Director for Israel Meir Brand told the Associated Press that they would not step in and censor anti-Semitism from their search results for Israeli searchers, despite demands from the Israeli authorities.To further confuse us as to their policy, there is the incidents in October of 2006, YouTube voluntarily censored all many videos containing depictions of Muhammed, as well as many videos that spoke negatively of Islamic-inspired terrorism, including Michelle Malkin. Google also voluntarily censored themselves to satisfy authorities in Beijing, restricting searcher access to “sensitive topics” like Taiwan and 1989’s Tiananmen Square massacre, as well as in Germany, removing Nazi content in compliance with national censorship laws.
Blogger and Mashable reader Constantine von Hoffman at Collateral Damage probably put it best when he said: “At this point, it would take a mashup of Wittgenstein, Quantum mechanics and LSD to make sense of Google’s various explanations for what it will and won’t censor and why.”
I would think it’s a pretty cut and dry situation - with child porn, there is very little room for gray. If there are traders and producers of child pornography, do your best to root it out. This isn’t as if it’s a form of civil disobedience or something - child pornographers aren’t members of the Boston Tea Party. It’s fairly cut and dried. If you know you have accurate information on a child pornographer in your system, you should turn it over to authorities.
In other words, there’s a time and place to fight over the privacy of your users, but to do so over child pornography isn’t the battle you should pick.
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