How safe are you?

I came across this interesting news item today, that made me sit up and take notice. A 22 year old Orkut user was arrested in Pune, here in India for posting “derogatory” messages against Sonia Gandhi in an Orkut forum. You can also read the IBN news article here. It seems that people from the Congress party lodged a police complaint against this guy, and the police contacted Google, which in turn was only happy to give out personal details of its offending subscriber “in compliance with valid Indian legal process”.

This is an excellent example of what I was talking about in one of my articles about online privacy. I haven’t read what the accused had posted on Orkut, so I can’t really talk about that. But one thing is for certain. If you write something which can be deemed offensive to someone, all it takes is a simple police complaint to land you in prison – don’t expect Google or any service provider to protect you. Because they won’t.

I repeat, constant vigilance!