orkut - About


About orkut Demographics User testimonials Tell us your story Keep orkut beautiful Safety and security

Keep orkut beautiful

orkut is an online community designed to help people connect, build relationships and create engaging communities around common interests. Since its inception in 2004, orkut has seen incredible growth around the world; we often hear users tell us how much orkut has come to mean in their lives (and if you're one of them, we encourage you to share your own story).

We love orkut just as much as you do, and we want to keep it fun and clean - or, as we like to call it, beautiful. Some of the attention orkut has received in the Brazilian media recently has given the impression that our community is rife with illegal activity and discontented users. Any active orkut user realizes that this characterization is simply false, that our site's very success has always been driven by our members' ability to create the engaging content and communities which comprise the bulk of orkut's population and content. In fact, orkut's top 50 communities, with more than 37 million total members and nearly 1.3 million daily visitors, have no illegal content whatsoever.

Just as in the offline world, however, there will always be content that some people find offensive or inappropriate. We apologize if we've given the impression that illegal or otherwise offensive content on orkut isn't an important issue to us. We agree that Google should have put more effort into communicating our thoughts and plans to our users as these issues arose. We know that we still have more work to do to minimize negative interactions on orkut and preserve the safe, vibrant and valuable community that is enjoyed today by the vast majority of our users. In this note, we want to let you know how we plan to achieve those goals - and what you can do to help.

Evaluating and removing illegal content

orkut derives its value from you, the users, and the content that you create. Similarly, we trust and rely on users to notify us of potential violations of our Terms of Service. When you do so, via email or by clicking the "report abuse" link that's prominently displayed on all orkut.com pages, we manually review the profile or community in question, and if it violates our terms of service, we remove that content and disable the account from which it was created.

In recent months, we've built a variety of tools to help us more efficiently conduct such reviews. We've increased how quickly we review and respond to user-reported instances of illegal or inappropriate content, and we continue to work on improving these tools and building new ones.

We believe the human eye is the most efficient tool for properly reviewing reports from our users. We are dedicating more resources worldwide, especially in markets where orkut is popular, like Brazil and India. Combined with our improved reviewing tools, we've been able to handle user reports with much greater efficiency.

Better communication with law enforcement

We recently designed a tool specifically to give government and law enforcement authorities a direct line of communication with Google at our headquarters in Mountain View, California. This "priority government reporting tool" allows select authorities to flag orkut content and receive our highest priority review and action. It also allows for requests of preservation of data pending a court order.

We're also working with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in the United States to automatically report any information that we discover on orkut.com which relates to child pornography, such as a user's email address.

It is also worth noting that Google has and will continue to cooperate as fully as possible in the investigation and prosecution of crimes, and may provide law enforcement authorities with information on users who abuse orkut, while taking care to balance our users' interests, the authorities' requests and the need for an appropriate and effective legal process.

Automatic detection of inappropriate content

We regret any instance when our users see illegal or offensive content on orkut. It's important to differentiate between offensive or inappropriate content and illegal content; there will always be material that some people find offensive or inappropriate, even if it isn't illegal or contrary to orkut's policies. And obviously, it's impossible to completely eradicate all offensive content in any community comprising millions of individuals, whether on- or offline.

Still, we're working hard on more ways to minimize it. We've put in a lot of effort over the years, for instance, to develop software that effectively determines a given web page's meaning in order to help people find relevant information across billions of pages. Now we're exploring ways to apply this technology to detect and remove questionable content on orkut

Protecting our users

One of orkut's primary values will always be the trust that our users have both in each other and in Google itself. We will always respect and earn that trust by doing our best to protect all our users. We've recently launched a new Safety and Security Center where you can, among other things, learn how to safeguard your orkut account, protect yourself against scams that ask for personal information, and report bad behavior to a community owner. There are also resources to help you find other organizations that support Internet safety.

How you can help

Ultimately, the preservation and improvement of the orkut experience is a responsibility we share with our members, as embodied in the set of shared values known as the orkut Community Standards, a living document that changes based on the needs of the community and the tools we're able to make available in order to serve them.

We encourage all our users to notify us using the "report abuse" link whenever you see violations of our community standards or our Terms of Service, and we urge you to pay particular attention to instances of illegal content; proactive, accurate flagging by users is one of the best ways we can all work together to ensure that orkut remains typified by positive and engaging experiences.

We also continue to build tools and launch features that help our users protect themselves. For those who manage communities, our new multiple moderator support enables you to add up to ten moderators to help you manage your community by removing inappropriate topics, messages, and events, and accepting, declining, banning and/or removing individual members and posts that violate your particular community's standards. We think these features give you the tools you need to help keep your own communities healthy, which in turn helps to keep all of orkut healthy.

We are committed to ensuring that our site continues to deliver on the philosophy of community for which you've come to trust and rely on us, and we hope you'll join us in our efforts to ensure that orkut stays healthy, growing and beautiful long into the future.

Updated: 3-October 2006