Every Bit You Make

About 11 million of Orkut's more than 15 million users are registered
as
living in Brazil � a remarkable figure given that studies have
estimated
that only about 12 million Brazilians use the Internet from home. (And
that
11 million does not include people like Ms. Makray, who clicked on
Hungary
as a nod to her heritage, or someone named Mauricio who wrote in
Portuguese
but jokingly registered as being from Mauritius.)

Expect Brazilian Portuguese dictionaries to add "orkut" to upcoming
editions. O Globo, Rio's biggest daily newspaper, refers to it without
further explanation. And the Brazilian media routinely measures the
popularity of music groups and actors by the number of user communities
dedicated to them on Orkut.

"Surto," a popular comedic play showing in Rio de Janeiro, is peppered
with
references to Orkut. And the site's jargon has entered the Brazilian
lexicon, like "scrap" (pronounced "SKRAH-pee" or "SHKRAH-pee"), meaning
a
note that one user leaves in another's virtual scrapbook for everyone �
including jealous boyfriends and girlfriends and curious suitors � to
see.

But the sheer popularity of Orkut, which people can join by invitation
only,
has had several unexpected consequences. Almost as soon as Brazilians
started taking over Orkut in 2004 � and long before April 2005, when
Google
made Orkut available in Portuguese � English-speaking users formed
virulently anti-Brazilian communities like "Too Many Brazilians on
Orkut."

And, more darkly, Orkut's success has made it a popular vehicle for
child
pornographers, pedophiles and racist and anti-Semitic groups, according
to
Brazilian prosecutors and nonprofit groups. Hatemongering on Orkut has
also
been decried in the United States and elsewhere, but it is in Brazil
where
the biggest effort is under way to halt the problem and confront
Google's
seemingly tight-lipped attitude.

SaferNet Brasil, a nongovernmental organization founded late last year,
tracks human rights violations on Orkut and has generated much press
coverage of illegal activity on the site. (Many forms of racist speech
are
outlawed in Brazil.)

SaferNet's president, Thiago Nunes de Oliveira, a professor of cyberlaw
at
the Catholic University of Salvador, said the problem had exploded in
the
last few months. "In 45 days of work, we identified 5,000 people who
were
using the Internet, and principally Orkut, to distribute images of
explicit
sex with children," he said. And that was aside from the racists,
neo-Nazis
and other hate groups the organization found.

In February, after several failed attempts to contact Google's Brazil
office, Mr. Nunes de Oliveira said, SaferNet Brasil filed a complaint
with
federal prosecutors in S�o Paulo. Prosecutors summoned Google's
Brazilian
sales staff to a meeting on March 10 and asked them for help
identifying
users breaking Brazilian human rights laws.

Google declined a reporter's requests for a direct interview with Mr.
Buyukkokten, but a spokeswoman forwarded some of Mr. Buyukkokten's
responses
by e-mail. The Brazilian office, he said, handles ad sales and does not
even
work with Orkut, which produces no revenue. "Orkut prohibits illegal
activity (such as child pornography) as well as hate speech and
advocating
violence," he wrote. "We will remove such content from Orkut when we
are
notified."

But Mr. Nunes de Oliveira said that removing the content was not what
they
were asking for. "The incapacity of the authorities to investigate
these
crimes is principally the lack of cooperation by Google in identifying
those
users," he said. He also worried that Google was not archiving evidence
of
crimes as it deleted offending pages.

Thamea Danelon Valiengo, part of a team of federal prosecutors working
on
cybercrime cases in S�o Paulo, agreed. She said that prosecutors had
asked
judges to order Google to turn over information on users who perpetrate
crimes. So far, she said, Google has agreed to send a lawyer to Brazil
for a
meeting in May.

Mr. Buyukkokten wrote by e-mail that Google would cooperate with the
authorities, but did not specify whether, for example, it would provide
logs
allowing users to be traced by their Internet address, as prosecutors
have
asked. A Google spokeswoman, Debbie Frost, said by e-mail that in four
to
six weeks, Orkut would deploy a tool that would "better identify and
remove
content that violates our terms of use."

In general, though, Orkut fanatics seem undisturbed by illegal activity
on
the site, which most of those interviewed said they had never come
across
personally. They were more interested in finding long-lost classmates
and
friends, one of the site's most lauded abilities. Schools, workplaces,
even
residential streets have "communities" joined by people who have
studied,
worked or lived there.

And everyone has stories of romance foiled by a telltale posting. Ms.
Makray
once found the page of a man who had flirted with her in a club. "He
hadn't
told me that he had children or that he was married," she said. "I
discovered it on Orkut."

Erika Laun, 23, checks Orkut every day from work to keep an eye on her
boyfriend. "When we were first going out," she said, "a girl who liked
him
was always sending messages and making fun of the messages that I sent
him."
The rival's sister, whom he didn't even know, helped out, sending
messages
like "Hey big boy, love you, 1,000 kisses."

"I was really angry," Ms. Laun said.

No one quite knows why Orkut caught on among Brazilians and not
Americans,
although the fact that it is an invitation-only network might explain
why it
exploded in Brazil. In a 2005 interview with the newspaper Folha de S�o
Paulo, Mr. Buyukkokten said it might be because Brazilians were "a
friendly
people," and perhaps because some of his own friends, among the first
to
join the network, had Brazilian friends.

Fernanda Leon, an architecture student eating at a Middle Eastern
restaurant
here with her boyfriend, said she thought Brazil had gravitated toward
Orkut
because of the country's inherently social culture. "Brazilians really
want
to interact with other people, both old friends and new people," she
said.
She has 379 friends on her network.

Mr. Nunes de Oliveira of SaferNet stressed that he was only against the
illegal uses of Orkut. "It's a fantastic tool, an excellent service,"
he
said. "We do not want it gone."