The Washington Post reported over the weekend on Google’s cooperation with a Brazilian court order to turn over “data that could help identify users accused of taking part in online communities that encourage racism, pedophilia and homophobia.”

ClickZ had a brief report, but smartly observed: Are the people Brazil is going after all Brazilian, or are there non-Brazilians in their sights? The eWeek story has a few interesting reader comments.

Google, which said earlier this month that they see “government intrusions rather than accidental public disclosures of data as the greatest threat to online privacy,” is stuck between a rock and a hard place, and the squeeze is only going to get tighter in the years to come.

On the one end of the spectrum, there’s hardly a soul out there who wouldn’t support any and all efforts to nab pedophiles, so we applaud Google cooperating with Brazil. On the other end, there’s the presumption of privacy that we all have when we search, visit Web sites and explore the Internet at large, so we applaud Google refusing to turn data over to a U.S. Dept. of Justice fishing expedition.

Between the two, though, there’s a vast grey area that’s muddied even further by variations in privacy law from state to state and country to country. Sooner or later, the lines will need to be drawn so that ISPs and Internet companies will know exactly what data they need to keep, for how long they have to keep it, to whom they’re required to turn it over and the conditions under which an individual’s private information should be revealed.

Over the next few years, we can expect to see a lot of activity in this area. It will all amount to nothing less than an elaboration of the fundamental definition of personal privacy and responsibility in the information age. If non-profit groups were openly traded stocks, I’d be bullish on EFF.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 6th, 2006 at 7:43 am and is filed under Internet Stuff, This 'n' That.