News Americas, SAN DIEGO, CA, Fri. Jan. 25, 2013: Two countries in Latin America and Trinidad & Tobago in the Caribbean were among 18 others globally who asked technology giant, Google, to remove content from its servers.
Google’s Transparency report released this week revealed they received a court order to remove 860 orkut profiles for impersonationfrom Brazil but removed only 834 of the profiles, which the company said, “fell within the scope of the order.” The majority of the Brazilian requests for removal of content from orkut related to alleged impersonation or defamation.
A court order was also received from the South America giant to remove 815 search results for linking to images and sites that reference an individual. Google said it removed just 207 of the search results, “which fell within the scope of the order.”
The company also said it received a request from a local law enforcement agency in Brazil to remove seven blog posts for allegedly defaming the honor of a local mayor, judge and police chief of the Pará State but did not remove the content.
Argentina also weighed in on this trend, asking Google via a court order, to remove 120 search results for linking to sites that allegedly reference individuals. But the technology giant said it “did not remove content in response to this request because the URLs listed did not reference the individuals cited in the order.”
From July to December 2009, a federal prosecutor claimed that information about him and his wife (a federal judge) had been posted for analysis on two political blogs and asked that we remove them. Google said it removed a portion of one of the blogs for revealing private information about the judge, but did not remove further content from the blogs as it did not violate internal policies.
Then between January to June 2010, the courts in Argentina issued two orders that sought the removal of every search result mentioning a particular individual’s name in association with a certain category of content. The number of search results at issue well exceeds 100,000 results. Google said it did not attempt to approximate the number of individual items of content that might be encompassed by those two court orders and appealed those orders.
And between January to June 2012, Google said received a court order to remove 120 search results for linking to sites that allegedly reference individuals but did not remove the content in response to this request because the URLs listed did not reference the individuals cited in the order.
Trinidad & Tobago authorities were the only ones from the Caribbean to make removal requests of Google. The report said it received a request between Jan. and June 2012, from legal representatives of a member of the executive branch to remove 10 YouTube videos for alleged defamation but did not remove any of the content.
The data reflect the number of law enforcement agency requests for information received at Google and YouTube.
