Google

Orkut Privacy Notice

December 15, 2010

The Google Privacy Policy describes how we treat personal information when you use Google's products and services, including information provided when you use orkut. In addition, the following describes our additional privacy practices that are specific to orkut. If you are using Google Talk in conjunction with orkut, please refer to the Google Talk Privacy Notice for information about our privacy practices that are specific to Talk.

Personal information

  • You need a Google Account to use orkut. Google asks for some personal information when you create a Google Account, including your email address and a password, which is used to protect your account from unauthorized access. A Google Account allows you to access many of our services that require registration.
  • As an orkut member, you can create a profile or orkut community that includes personal information, such as your gender, age, occupation, hobbies, and interests, plus other content, such as photos. This information may be accessed and viewed by other Internet users on various search engines, as determined by your privacy settings. If you restrict accessibility to your community by changing the privacy setting from “open” to ‘hidden’, or by opting to making it inaccessible to the Web, that change will be recorded immediately and ‘crawlers’ of various search engines will be blocked from accessing your community, however, Google does not control the content that may already have been indexed or cached by third party websites and therefore may continue to appear there till the content on such websites is refreshed.
  • When you invite new members into your network or send messages through orkut – including messages sent to non-orkut users, such as to share your photo albums or events with them - we collect and maintain information associated with those messages, including email addresses and content. We also automatically store contact information about such non-orkut users in your “contacts” list. That contacts list also includes:
    • your Gmail contact list, which is pre-populated in your orkut “contacts”;
    • contact information that you provide to us about your friends (both orkut and non-orkut users) via the “find friends” or “contacts” features in orkut; and
    • contact information for your friends (including non-orkut users) to whom you have sent messages through Picasa or another Google service that you access through your Google Account
  • When you send and receive SMS messages to or from the orkut website, we collect and maintain information associated with those messages, such as the phone number, the wireless carrier associated with the phone number, the content of the message, and the date and time of the transaction.
  • When you interact with an orkut feature, we may collect and maintain information about your activities linked to that feature. In the case of Promotions, we keep track of which promotions we have served to you, and if you interact with a Promotion we will also collect and maintain data relating to your clicks, your deletion of the promotion, and your forwarding of the promotion to your orkut friends.

Uses and Information Sharing

  • Google maintains and processes your personal information and content of your communications in order to provide your orkut account, access to that account, and use of orkut services, in addition to the purposes described in the Google Privacy Policy. Orkut services include relevant advertising and related links based on the content of your profile and messages exchanged by you as part of your activity streams on your profile. Your profile information is displayed according to the preferences you set in your account.
  • When you send messages through orkut, your name and email address will be identified in the message. We also use your name and email address to notify you of new members, messages, or other information, such as invitations to join friends' networks, new testimonials or "fan" ratings, and crush notices.
  • If you invite another person to join orkut, we use the name and email address you provide us to contact that person and, if necessary, remind that person that he or she has been invited to join orkut. All invitees are given the option not to receive further invitations from orkut.
  • If you invite non-orkut users to view content on orkut, we use the name and email address you provide us to contact that person, and to store that information for purposes related to your use of Google Account services, such as to maintain your orkut “contacts” list or to make suggestions of friends based on common contacts. We also use that information to maintain a history on that person’s behalf of content that orkut users have shared with them on orkut.
  • If you provide us with contact information for non-orkut users, we store that information for purposes related to your use of Google Account services, such as to maintain your contacts list, to suggest that you invite such contacts to join orkut, or to make suggestions of friends based on common contacts.
  • Friends or other persons who know your email address can use that address to look up whether you have an orkut profile registered under that email address and which orkut profile has been created under that email address. Orkut friends can identify you in any photo that they or their friends have uploaded to orkut, by “tagging” you in that photo. You can opt-out of being “tagged” in photos via your “settings” preference.
  • When you send and receive SMS messages to or from the orkut website, we use the data we collect to operate, develop and improve our services. Our third party providers also may collect data about your SMS usage in order to provide the service. In addition, your wireless carrier collects data about your SMS usage. Their practices are governed by their own privacy policies.
  • Orkut allows third-party developers to upload applications to the orkut application directory. You may choose to use an application by adding it to your profile. If you add an application to your profile, the application may collect information from your profile or other information about your activities on orkut, and share that information with others. Please see our Terms of Use of Applications for details about data sharing when you add an application.
  • When one of your orkut friends adds an application to their profile page, your public profile name, profile URL and profile photo will be shared with the developer of the application and with other users and viewers of the application, even if you have not added that application to your profile.

Ads served on orkut

  • Orkut strives to provide you with relevant and useful advertising and we use the DoubleClick cookie, as well as other third party ad serving systems, to do so. We may use a range of information including cookies, web beacons, IP addresses, usage data and other non-personal information about your computer or device (such as browser type and operating system) to provide you with relevant advertising. If you are logged into your Orkut Account, we may also show you advertising based on the information you have provided to us in your Orkut Account.
  • We use the DoubleClick cookie on Orkut to help advertisers and publishers serve and manage ads on this site and other Google and AdSense partner websites. Advertisers may serve ads based on interests associated with non-personally identifiable online activities including activity on other AdSense partner sites. Advertisers may also serve ads to you based on previous activity on that advertiser's website. This non- personally identifiable information is held separately from your Orkut Account data, or other personally identifying information in our possession.
  • You may view, edit and add to the categories used to provide you with interest- based advertising in the Ads Preferences Manager for the DoubleClick cookie. Your ads preferences will be respected across Orkut, AdSense partner sites and Google sites using the DoubleClick cookie to serve such ads. For more information about interest-based advertising and the Ads Preference Manager see our FAQ.
  • You also may choose to opt out of the DoubleClick cookie at any time. If you select the DoubleClick opt-out cookie, ads delivered to your browser by our ad serving technology will not be served based on the DoubleClick cookie. Find more information here about opting out of the DoubleClick cookie.
  • Ads served on orkut outside of applications: Other third-party ad serving companies may display ads on orkut, provided they comply with our ad serving requirements. Google uses Google AdSense technology to serve ads on the orkut website. Most of the ads you see on orkut (outside of applications) are served by Google through Google AdSense. However, Google also allows advertisers to choose to use a third-party ad server to serve ads through AdSense. Those third-party ad servers may use cookies or web beacons to recognize your computer for purposes of tailoring advertising content or measuring ad effectiveness. A list of those third party servers is available here, along with links to their websites which provide information about how to opt-out of their cookies if such functionality is available from the ad server. Orkut does not provide any personal information to these third-party ad servers or ad networks without your consent. We provide advertisers only aggregated non-personal information such as the number of times one of their ads was clicked.
  • Ads served within applications: Application developers may choose to use a third-party ad server to serve ads into the developer's applications on the orkut site. Such ad servers may use cookies or web beacons to recognize your computer for purposes of tailoring advertising content or measuring ad effectiveness. We encourage you to contact the application developers to obtain more information about which ad servers the developers use and/or if you are seeking information about how to opt-out of the cookie for such ad servers (if such functionality is available from the ad servers).

Your choices

  • Google provides a number of tools to restrict who can view certain portions of your profile and certain other information that you provide on the site. For example, when you create your profile you can limit the viewing of certain information to yourself, your friends, friends of friends, or make the information available to all orkut members.
  • You can update your profile information at any time by clicking on the "edit" button in your profile setting.
  • Messages you receive from orkut can be sent to your primary email address or orkut inbox, depending on the preferences you choose in the "my settings" page.
  • You can terminate your account at any time. To learn how, click here. If you terminate your account, your profile, including any messages in your inbox, will be removed from the site and deleted from orkut servers. Because of the way we maintain this service such deletion may not be immediate, and residual copies of your profile information may remain on backup systems.

More information

Google adheres to the US Safe Harbor privacy principles. For more information about the Safe Harbor framework or our registration, see the Department of Commerce's web site.

Further information about orkut is available here.

For more information about our privacy practices, go to the full privacy policy. If you have additional questions, please contact us any time. Or write to us at:

Privacy Matters
c/o Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View CA 94043 (USA)

©2009 Google - About orkut