Major Net Privacy Set-back Ruling

After a new U.S. court ruling, Google must now release information on the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched any kind of video on YouTube. While this ruling was issued in a U.S. court, it is believed it will be enforced worldwide.

The ruling was propagated by Viacom’s $1 billion lawsuit against the Google owned site for what Viacom alleges to be copyright infringement. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has called the ruling a “set-back to privacy rights”.

Under the court’s direction the YouTube viewing log must be handed over to Viacom, however, the company is required to not make log-in user ID’s, the computer’s IP address or the video clip information available for general public consumption, however, the information could end up being used in the court room in Viacom’s case against Google.

The United Kingdom is also a part of Viacom’s class action suit against YouTube through its Premier League. It too alleges YouTube has illegally used snippets from English football on the site.

Last year, in response to the suit, YouTube initiated some filtering tool capability in an effort to prevent copyright materials from appearing on the site, however, that hasn’t prevented the suit from going forward or this judge’s current privacy invasion ruling.

“We are disappointed the court granted Viacom’s over-reaching demand for viewing history, stated Catherine Lacavera - a Google attorney. “We will ask Viacom to respect users’ privacy and allow us to anonymise the logs before producing them under the court’s order.”

For Viacom’s part, they indicated they have little interest on who is downloading material but want to “compare the attractiveness of allegedly infringing video with that of non-infringing videos.”

Others just as concerned over the privacy issue don’t blame Viacom or the Premier League for this action but think the blame lays squarely on the shoulders of Google and its leadership.

Simon Davies, a leading privacy expert recently told the BBC News that the privacy of millions of YouTube users was threatened and that “The chickens have come home to roost for Google.”

“Their [Google’s] arrogance and refusal to listen to friendly advice has resulted in the privacy of tens of millions being placed under threat,” Davies said.

Davies went on to say that “Governments and organisations are realising that companies like Google have a warehouse full of data. And while that data is stored it is under threat of being used and putting privacy in danger.”

The EFF, however, sees this more as a real privacy issue than a finger-pointing one and have asked Viacom to move away from the slippery slop it is trying to ascend by using the courts.

“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,” the electronics foundation said.

Since the log information the courts are allowing Viacom and others to see do have information of a private and personal nature and Google has done little to protect that data, this could end up being one of the biggest internet can of worms to be opened in the history of the Net.