Orkut Info Leak Update

Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped recently reported on leaked Orkut data. He’d found a non-Google site that allowed visitors to trace the relationships between Orkut members on a map of the United States.

This raised concerns about Orkut’s ability to contain data, as the Orkut map maker claimed “an associate of mine aquired a mirror of the entire Orkut website.”

Lenssen updated the story with his report that “someone told me that ‘Orkut Police’ noticed the bots screen-scraping the site and quickly stopped them. Thus the data grabbed is quite old, and further trouble is not ahead.”

Can Orkut prevent further screen-scraping though? Can Orkut members be sure their personal information is secure? I suppose you could ask the same of Friendster or any of the other networking sites, but they’re not Google-owned

Garrett French is the editor of iEntry’s eBusiness channel. You can talk to him directly at WebProWorld, the eBusiness Community Forum.