14 DAY TRIAL // Similar discussions surfaced in the past so it shouldn't be too surprising that Google disclosed private details concerning a user as part of a police investigation. According to Network World, the Pune police arrested Rahul Krishnakumar Vaid a few days ago under charges of publishing obscene content on the Internet. It seems that the IT professional uploaded the material on Orkut, the social network website owned by Google.
Orkut is said to have approximately 60 million users, most of them coming from Brazil and India, two of the countries in which the social network is placed among the most visited websites. However, Orkut hasn't evolved too much on the other sides of the market in which MySpace, Facebook and a few other services lead the battle.
Getting back to the report, Google only provided the IP of the Orkut user who posted offensive material concerning Sonia Gandhi, an Indian politician, and the authorities could easily identify the suspect. As usual, using the IP, the police contacts the Internet Service Provider from which the investigators get contact information and other details about the user.
As mentioned, such cases also took place in the past and shouldn't be a surprise if Google is asked to provide private details about its users. Depending on a country's laws, the companies are forced to comply with the demands, so there's no way to avoid providing private details. In fact, TorrentSpy found an interesting but less useful method in the past when, asked to disclose information about visitors of the website, it banned all the US users. Because there were only non-US visitors, there was no information to disclose, so TorrentSpy could protect the privacy of its users in a simple manner.
Google also has a history in such cases because YouTube, the video sharing service owned by the Mountain View-company helped authorities identify and charge a member suspected of uploading pirated copies of a movie even before it was officially launched. At that time, the user named EcoTotal could be found using private information gathered by YouTube's servers once he accessed the website, information which was later used in the lawsuit filed against him.