YouTube owner Google has been forced by a New York judge to hand over the personal information of every person who has ever watched a video on the YouTube to US broadcaster Viacom, whose TV channels include MTV, Paramount and Nickelodeon.
The information is of more than 100 million people, their viewing habits, internet and email addresses, and enough data to identify individuals.
Privacy activists from the Digital rights group, Electronic Frontier Foundation, said yesterday the order by Judge Louis Stanton of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York “threatens to expose deeply private information”, calling the court order a “set-back to privacy rights”.
In a response to the ruling, Google said: “We are disappointed the court granted Viacom’s overreaching 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.”
Although Viacom’s move may be seen by some as a bargaining gambit to get Google to cough up royalties, it is a deeply unsettling development for privacy and personal liberties advocates. In 2006 the US Department of Justice demanded that Google hand over details of millions of searches conducted by its users, and although it was unsuccessful in its demands (Google challenged it and won), a collective shudder was felt across the Internet.
Viacom may be right to demand royalties for copyrighted material it owns, but if indeed, as it claims, it is only out to prove the case against YouTube, it should take up Google’s offer to anonymise the disks of personal information before it scours them for evidence to support its commercial case.
Further reading:
Viacom lawsuit: Google told to hand over all YouTube user details (Guardian)
Judge orders Google to give YouTube user data to Viacom (AFP)
UPDATE (15 July 08): YouTube, the online video site owned by Google, has struck a deal to strip potentially compromising personal information out of reams of user data that it is being forced to hand over to Viacom (more)
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