Google's senior litigation counsel Catherine Lacavera said in a statement: "We are disappointed the court granted Viacom's over-reaching demand for viewing history.
"We will ask Viacom to respect users' privacy and allow us to anonymise the logs before producing them under the court's order."
The ruling will see the viewing habits of millions of YouTube users given to Viacom, totalling more than 12 terabytes of data.
Viacom said it wanted the data to "compare the attractiveness of allegedly infringing video with that of non-infringing videos."
Well, I'm against any company being forced to reveal user logs in this manner.. hopefully no personally identifiable information will be revealed.
In the news today it came out that ISP here in the UK are sending letters to known customers who download illegally, ie music films, so again big brother watching!!
Only one thing that can be said: "What goes around, comes around"
My personal point of view:
It's absolutely incredible! The company that plasters everyone's personal information, from images to records to credit information, maps images of your property for public view with complete disregard to someone's privacy; the ones that are fighting to index medical data, protected by HIPAA laws - Google, is standing up, whining about Viacom gaining access/insight to their users personal data?! Give me a break already!
Their audacity is record breaking, really...
Doggonit, my deepest darkest secret will be revealed: I enjoy monty python clips. Curses, I feel violated.
Last year the senior database analyst for Cytergy decided he would start his own business, so he stole - thanks to cytergy's lax oversight - over 12 million records. He then sold those records - which included names, ssn, checking accounts, visa card numbers and expiration dates, etc. - to whomever he wanted to.
These companies that insist on collecting data need to be subjected to especially harsh penalties for allowing the data they collect to be dispersed in such manners: I for one am for caning the bastards.
Well, I, for one, view it as an unecessary violation of my right to privacy, regardless of what I view on YouTube.. viewing habit trends are one thing.. IP addreses or other potentially personally identifiable info is verboten in my book unless you gave advance consent to it's being released.
Heh, I was still sorta typing. Oh, I agree, this is a profound violation of privacy, uncalled for.
I can see a day when every car will have the on star type system installed, and some bright gonad will figure a way to bundle it into a live database of my personal info.....where I am at any given second, the retail addresses near where the car paused, the data collection could go on and on.
To be fair to Google - they are not willingly handing over the data but are being
forced to by court order. It's the justice system that needs to get a handle on
the ramifications of this. It's a very slippery slope we're heading down. However,
maybe these big companies should not keep such detailed long term records of
the users of their sites if they can't guarantee privacy. Of course the drive of the
advertising market will insure that they'll try to get all the details they can to
increasingly market to the individual. I just don't like the direction this is
heading in.
as the internet becomes more and more integrated into our lives, there will be more and more regulation by the law over it. our rights might be protected by the law, but our Internet rights are not really defined and laid out, are they?
the net is basically 'the new world'. instead of finding a new country to control... now corporation, governments, and other entities are fighting to gain control over this new empire. it used to be that the net was a free playground for anybody...but now that there's money to be made, the corporations are waging war and planning a take over from the people that use it.
this is why i deep down support pirate sites and peer 2 peer networks...a kind of 'screw you' to the corporations and government that are trying to *ck us over.
this is also why we need to fight for our internet rights...RIGHT NOW while there are precedents to be set.
imo
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- Think for yourself - Think outside the box -
Funny that Viacom wants to go after Youtube viewers, and than squeeze the actors and what not via internet sales, hence the writers and actors strikes.
Well, i agree with everybody, this is just uncalled for and i am glad i am not watching a lot movies on youtube, the p-movies i preferr are not there hehehe
I'm not bothered by it. What bothers me is the double standard that "our lordship" Google is running. They're giving a rats arse about everyone's privacy, but as soon as someone else has a rightful claim, they get bent out of shape.
