Judge Says Google Has to Handover All YouTube User Data
There’s bad news today for privacy advocates with Wired.com reporting that a judge is ordering YouTube to provide Viacom with the hsitory of all of their users. They say, “Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users’ names and IP addresses.” This is in regards to that lawsuit that Viacom filed against Google back in March last year for $1 billion over damages for copyright infringement.
In the past Google has been pretty good about fighting for the privacy of their users, and in this situation they said that turning over the required data would be invading on their users’ privacy, but the judge essentially said “too bad.” The logs of information are contained on four tera-byte hard drives which Google must hand over to Viacom. Google will also have to provide Viacom with a list of all of the videos ever removed from YouTube for any reason.
Now why on Earth would Viacom want all of the data of YouTube users? Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch says the Judge presiding over this, Judge Stanton is “a moron” because turning over this information will allow Viacom to sue those who have watched copyrighted content. Did you get that, those who have simply watched, and not uploaded the content, could get sued. I don’t know about you, but I could have easily watched a copyrighted clip without even know that it was illegal. How are we supposed to keep track of every legal and illegal video on YouTube?
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, as you can imagine, isn’t too happy about this. They posted about the ruling already and said, “The Court’s erroneous ruling is a set-back to privacy rights, and will allow Viacom to see what you are watching on YouTube. We urge Viacom to back off this overbroad request and Google to take all steps necessary to challenge this order and protect the rights of its users.” At this point it looks like it’s up to Google to take some serious steps to protect the privacy of their users, otherwise we could see users fighting back with a class-action lawsuit.
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Is there still a possibility for Google to go to a higher court?
From what I gather Google will have the opportunity to fight this, but that’s not to say they will win.
Why does Google have to fork over our IP addresses? They don’t need these to investigate the popularity of pirated YouTube videos! Now they’re gonna sue thousands of users for watching clips of The Colbert Report that strangely seem to make people watch television more often…
Besides, YouTube shouldn’t be keeping track of our video watching history dammit!
This is messed up.
That’s good to know Ryan, at least there’s still a chance to fix this then.
Pieter, I can imagine that they’re tracking this so they can offer a more personalized experience to individual users. It would be nice if they would allow us to turn this off though.
I was actually just thinking the same thing this morning when talking about the YouTube thing with someone. They should offer some privacy options so that people can avoid complications like these.
It’s like Google handing over your search history…
It is, and at one point they were going to have to turn over search history but they fought it and won.
This is completely bullshit.i hope that google win this and we don’t have to handle this crap