• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, September 5, 2006

Google this weekend decided to turn over records to the Brazilian government about users of Orkut, the company's social-networking service that has found a large fan base in Brazil. Or at least, that had a large Brazilian fan base before agreeing to roll over.

The Brazilian government is investigating people who've allegedly used the service to participate in Web groups that it deems illegal. The groups allegedly encourage racism and homophobia, among other objectionable stances, according to The Washington Post. But, at least as far as we know, members of the groups have only expressed opinions on the forums. Nothing has come to light in the press to show that members of the groups have acted on whatever beliefs they're accused of harboring.

Of course, in some countries, expressing opinions is criminal. But Google's headquartered in the United States, where the First Amendment is supposed to protect people's right to express themselves, no matter how offensive their views.

But like The New York Times, Google obviously feels that it has to defer to other countries' laws if it's to do business there--even if those laws don't respect the very principles of free expression that have enabled companies like itself to thrive in the United States.

Among the information the Brazilian government is seeking are Internet Protocol addresses of users, and e-mail addresses or other personally identifying information that people gave when they signed up for Orkut. After initially balking at the request, and being threatened with up to $23,000 a day in fines, Google agreed to comply.

"What they're asking for is not billions of pages," Nicole Wong, Google associate general counsel, told The Washington Post. "In most cases, it's relatively discrete--small and narrow." Tell that to whoever ends up arrested.

In the meantime, new services are sprouting up with the purpose of deliberately foiling attempts to connect individuals to their Web activities. In addition to "anonymizers" that provide fake IP addresses, one new piece of software, "Track Me Not," randomly sends search engines nonsensical queries just to foil attempts to make sense of users' data. New York University associate professor Helen Nissembaum and Daniel Howe, of the NYU Media Research Lab, created Track Me Not--a Firefox extension--in response to companies' habit of collecting data from search users. "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 wrote on a site explaining the software.

If Google, AOL and other Internet companies are going to insist on saving information that potentially compromises people's privacy, look for more and more companies to foil those services. Just as some Web users learned to delete cookies when they thought cookies put their security at risk, so will people decide to mask IP addresses or otherwise cover their online tracks.