Thursday, July 3, 2008

Google Ordered to Hand Over YouTube User Data

The Wired blog writes that a judge ruled that Google will have to “turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users’ names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube.” Viacom allegedly likes to have that data to prove “that infringing material is more popular than user-created videos.”

Seems like a clear user privacy violation. Besides, Viacom don’t need actual IPs [edit: ... or login names ...] to validate their claims – it would be enough to get a made-up but consistent user ID for that (if they would need some way to count users in the first place). I wonder if Google can go into some revision asking for this order to be changed?

[Thanks Juha-Matti Laurio!]

Google Ordered to Hand Ov ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (1+18)

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