YouTube Unveiled
Posted on July 3, 2008
You probably know of the lawsuit Viacom has against Google for a billion bucks. They are claiming copyright violations due to Viacom owned videos uploaded to YouTube.
As a result of the disclosure part of the proceedings, a federal judge has ordered Google to turn over to Viacom its records of which users watched which videos on YouTube.
Red flag here, right? Regardless that all you watched were videos of your kid’s little league baseball games that you personally uploaded, I bet you still don’t want Viacom with their hands on that information.
The order has raised a lot of concerns among YouTube users and privacy advocates that the viewing habits of millions of people could be released to Viacom. The companies say they are hoping to come up with a way to protect the site’s visitors from exposure.
Maybe the real concern is not so much that Viacom may get access to that private data but rather that companies like Google may be collecting large amounts of private data that could fall into the wrong hands.
It’s ever too common to hear of someone having a notebook stolen or lost that contains important, even critical data on millions of customers. To me, there’s less concern about Google misusing the data than there is about someone losing the data.
For every video on YouTube, the judge required Google to turn over to Viacom the login name of every user who had watched it, and their IP address.
Believe it or not, both companies have argued that IP addresses alone cannot be used to reveal the identities of individuals with certainty. Surely they didn’t say that, did they? Even a dynamic IP address, though not as easily traced as a static one is tied right back to your location. Legal entity has but to request that identity, giving IP, date and time - the ISP has but to access log files to pinpoint the origin. The only way to avoid being IDed that way is to use a good proxy server that hides your IP. But unless they destroy their logs or don’t collect any, they have your info too.
Perhaps the companies’ contention of no certain identity comes from the idea that though usage is traced to a location, any person with access could have used the computer. Forget that. When they start pressuring your wife and kids, they’ll squeal on you in a heartbeat!
As to the information itself, Viacom has some work on their hands parsing the data they will be receiving. Think about it. They are wanting all records since YouTube started in 2005. How massive is that? Well, in just one recent month, 80 something million people watched well over 4 billion video clips. One month. And they’ve been around for three years. Forget the fact of the exponential growth and just say WOW, that’s a lot of records.
But they can still find YOU!
» Filed Under Google, Viacom, YouTube
Comments
One Response to “YouTube Unveiled”
Leave a Reply
[…] in a string of privacy-related announcements to come from the big G. This follows on the heels of Viacom requesting and receiving court approval for access to Google’s search logs and records. Since […]