Privacy? What Privacy?
July 3rd, 2008 - 10:04 am
As part of its $1 billion lawsuit against user-video site YouTube, Viacom will receive a complete log of all users’ activities, which will include a list of usernames, IP addresses, and videos that each account has viewed in the past.
I thought everyone should about the latest blatant attack on privacy rights by a major corporation aided by a judge. Amazingly, the judge didn’t grant all of Viacom’s wishes, one of which was copies of every video on the site marked as private. Had he approved that request as well, I would not only be as livid as I am right now, I’d be making phone calls, sending emails, and generally being a huge pain in the ass to anyone I could find at both Viacom and the New York court system. As it is, I am just really, really livid about identifying information and usage data being handed over to Viacom to do who knows what with at some time in the future.
If I were Google and hand to hand over 12 terabytes of user logs, I would print them out on paper, double-spaced and single sided, and FedEx the damn thing to them. It doesn’t appear they specifically demanded it be in digital format, and I am sure they’d really rather have it in an easy-to-search form, which is why boxes and boxes of paper would be just the kick in the groin they deserve.
Up until this point, I hadn’t had much of a problem with Viacom suing Google for the posting of copyrighted materials to YouTube, because I do believe strongly in not letting copyright infringement go totally unchecked. But with this latest action by Viacom, my mood has changed where that company is concerned. Screw Viacom!
Anyone interested in reading more about this issue should check out the latest post on the subject at Electronic Frontier Foundation as well.
4 Responses to “Privacy? What Privacy?”
I wonder if Viacom have a UK office?
UK law permits me, for a fee of not more than £10 to see every piece of data a company holds on me.
I’d be willing to bet Viacom has a UK office and that they are an actual multinational corporation.
Interesting law. Pretty sure we don’t have anything like that over here, and if we do/did, it would cost more than a normal person could afford.
The logic is that if they can handle customer data responsibly then they can retrieve it cheaply because they’re organised. Obviously this doesn’t apply to governments.
I note Google set the groundwork for this ruling with their notorious ‘ip addresses are not personal information’ claim.
Not happy with Google either. First there’s the whole “ip addresses are not personal information”, which they are. I could be track down by law enforcement or lawyers using any IP address that has ever been associated with my house, and it isn’t like we get a new one every day. We’ve had the same one since January, and I imagine we’ll have it until we have a power outage or we reboot the router for some reason. So yes, it is, in fact, my “address.”
And then there’s the whole question of why exactly YouTube needs to have a list of every video I have ever watched there. Oh, I know they’d say it’s so they can recommend videos to me and target ads properly and probably a few other perfectly “valid” reasons. It’s still annoying. Every video ever? Now I’d like to see the data for me on that. I’m betting kitten videos would be the majority of them … and political speeches.
Viacom also wanted “all videos that were once
available for public viewing on YouTube.com but later removed for any reason, or such subsets as plaintiffs designate.” Now why, exactly would YouTube have copies of videos that users deleted from their accounts? According to the legal document I have been reading about this, it’s millions of videos. YouTube is keeping copies of millions of videos people believe they have deleted from their accounts or which have been removed for other reasons. Why? What good does it do them? I can’t think of any reason to keep them eternally. Well, in this case, it might hang them.
Neither Google or Viacom is coming out of this smelling of roses. Google keeps too much data on users, and Viacom wants too much data on those users. All of it displeases me.