Orkut in trouble again,
this time over Shivaji
18 Nov, 2006. PUNE: Where
there’s a bustling web, there are spiders. In the past five months, the
cyber crime cell (CCS) of the Mumbai Police has received 15 complaints
against Orkut — the hugely popular social interactive website owned by
US-based online search giants Google. Most of them complained about how
a million cheesy phone calls haunted them because of a mischievous user
who flashed their contact details on the Orkut profile.
Prerna Kulkarni (name changed),
a 20-year-old economics student in Mumbai University, went into hibernation
after one day she woke up to a hundred phone calls asking her out for a
raunchy date. It took her around a week to figure out the cause of this
nightmare. “My sister found that someone had made a fake profile on my
name and posted lots of filth on it,” she said.
Fresh trouble has been caused
by Google's www.Orkut.com whose 'We hate India'contents had provoked a
public interest litigation and the issuance of a notice by the Bombay high
court (Aurangabad bench) last month.
This time, the uproar is
over defamatory remarks about Maratha warrior-king Chhatrapati Shivaji
Maharaj. These remarks, in the form of a 160-word posting on one of Orkut’s
community web pages, has led the Shiv Sena, the National Students Union
of India (NSUI) and the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM) among others
to file a police complaint against unknown persons.
Earlier in the day, students
and political activists visited various cyber cafes and urged their operators
to block the Orkut website.
Adopting the Gandhigiri form
of protest, NSUI activists distributed flowers to cyber cafe owners and
operators, while Shiv Sena members distributed leaflets and got a number
of cyber cafes to down shutters for nearly half an hour.
Dhiraj Ghate, BJYM city unit
member, lodged a complaint with the Pune crime branch against unknown members
of the community page.
A study conducted by fropper.com
identifies people aged 18-25 as the target group. The study shows that
the market size of social websites has grown in India from Rs2 crore
in the financial year 2003-04 to Rs5 crore this year. The booming market
is drawing new social websites like gazzag.com, jhoos.com and fropper.com.
Despite of several attempts to contact Sundar K, head sales and operations
of Google India, he was unavailable for comment.
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