Google has sent a cease-and-desist letter to close the Orkut Personal Network Geomapper web site.
The site lets you look up anyone in the Orkut database at the time the information was mined, then see their connections. However, Google says the information is used without permission.
“It has come to our attention that a former orkut.com member violated our Terms of Service, which prohibits users from crawling the orkut.com site for purposes of repurposing and disclosing information outside of the service. Moreover, state and federal laws prohibit such activities. We have notified the owner that he has violated our Terms of Service, as well as other laws, and demanded that the orkut.com information be removed from his site immediately,” Google said in an email statement.
Site creator Rolan Yang has posted a copy of the cease-and-desist letter here and also within a forum area where the service is discussed, in a thread where he suggests that the site may be closed.
More about how the site works and data was obtained can be found in our previous article, Google’s Orkut Personal Information Offered Outside Orkut.