Earlier this month Louis L. Stanton, the senior judge on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, ordered Google to hand over YouTube user log data to Viacom to help Viacom determine damages in their ongoing billion dollar litigation with Google.
We and others cried out in protest, since the data being delivered included username, IP address and identifiers of all videos viewed on YouTube. And the entity it was being delivered to has a penchant for litigating over copyright infringement (some of their many lawsuits are mentioned in the original post). The fear is that if data is turned over to Viacom, any YouTube user who has watched a copyrighted video would be subject to a lawsuit.
Viacom’s first line of defense when the negative press hit was obfuscation. They said “Viacom has not asked for and will not be obtaining any personally identifiable information of any YouTube user. The personally identifiable information that YouTube collects from its users will be stripped from the data before it is transferred to Viacom.”
Sounds good, right? The LA Times mentioned it in their article on the issue and quoted Viacom. A number of other publications then followed, saying that Viacom wasn’t going to collect all the data they were entitled to under the order.
But not really. Everyone involved in the lawsuit (except the users, who weren’t asked) agreed that a YouTube login ID isn’t personally identifiable. The original Stanton order summarized: “Defendants do not refute that the “login ID is an anonymous pseudonym that users create for themselves when they sign up with YouTube” which without more “cannot identify specific individuals”.”
So Viacom didn’t abandon any of their data rights, but they sure went out of their way to suggest they did. And anyone who watched the 2006 AOL search debacle will know that users were absolutely identified based on nothing more than a list of the search terms they entered. Does anyone really believe that a motivated plaintiff couldn’t identify individuals based on a user selected ID (mine is “TechCrunch”), IP address and a list of all watched videos?
Now Viacom is talking again, and saying that they won’t use the information to go after individuals.
Here’s the problem – I don’t know if Viacom will live up to their promise, or not. The fact that Google is unwilling to hand over employee data tells me they’re not so sure, either. And frankly I shouldn’t have to care or have to worry about Viacom’s trustworthiness. As a user I interacted only with Google, and there are implicit and explicit promised by Google to protect my data. If Google hands my data over to Viacom, it doesn’t really matter to me if Viacom uses it or not. All I will remember is that Google gathered and stored information without my consent, and then handed it over at the first sign of trouble.
Google’s self imposed code of conduct is “Don’t be evil.” It doesn’t say “don’t be evil unless there’s important litigation at stake.” Google’s reputation is on the line, and how they respond will show their true character. They’ve shown they’ll go to bat for employees, now it’s time for them to show they’ll go to bat for their users.
Google really did drop the ball on this one. I would hope that Google, as the internet’s biggest superpower when it comes to info, would’ve handled this a bit better.
I really want to know why Google kept all of that data for so long? What is the benefit for them?
Nobody should trust Google.
I’m afraid I have to disagree. The privacy section on Google clearly states “We may also share information with third parties in limited circumstances, including when complying with legal process”. There’s nothing evil about obeying a court order.
What other company’s reputation has been challenged by a TechCrunch guy when they actually comply with legal process?
This post’s author also demonstrates his insensitivity towards legal issues when he commented on his previous post, Judge Protects YouTube’s Source Code, Throws Users To The Wolves, that:
“And anyone who watched the 2006 AOL search debacle will know that users were absolutely identified based on nothing more than a list of the search terms they entered.”
Wrong, those were search queries(AOL). The queries contained Social security numbers and other personal information. I had downloaded the info and put it into a SQL database when it was made available by AOL at the time.
If you are worried about it you can simply log out of youtube and clear your cookies before watching a video.
Nobody’s going to use their social security number or Aunt’s phone number as their youtube username.
Even if they did, it wouldn’t be identifiable enough to prove that they are in fact that user in an RIAA case against them. I am not for viacom in any way. I just think you’re blowing it out of proportion.
Well written, Mike.
Here’s a question though:
It is clearly useful for a site to store historical user data in order to deliver a better experience to that user (e.g. Amazon’s famous Related Items). How can a successful web app continue to do that without exposing its users to some dumbass litigatory ruling like this one?
Dude I thought you were a lawyer. If anyone you should be the one figuring out the loopholes. Eh.
Update:
Viacom is now demanding the video watching and uploading data of the EMPLOYESS of YouTube – their video watching habbits. Of course, Google is fighting this…
You should read Viacom’s bizarre rationalization:
http://blogosco...rum/135759.html
Hmm…advocating for civil disobedience, are we? This is a tough issue for Google, and I’m glad I’m not the one who has to make the call. I still think providing the data in paper form is the best solution
If everyone agrees that there’s no personally identifiable information in the logs, let’s have Viacom and Google put their money where their mouth is. Have them publish the logs, then offer a bounty of, say, $10,000 for every person identified from them.
No? Right.
“Viacom is now demanding the video watching and uploading data of the EMPLOYESS of YouTube – their video watching habbits. Of course, Google is fighting this…”
This should be the #1 thing google should be forced to hand over. Forget the users, I want to see them hand over theirs before mine.
Their are a lot of benefits to long term data tracking in understanding trends and traffic flow. A study that looks at data over 1 year period is far less useful than a study that looks at data over a 10 year period.
Browse the reason this litigation happened is because it costs a lot of money to review content. Google must of seen this day happening but decided to try to make as much money in the short term. You just have to be more careful when it comes to video. It would be nice if their was a service where you could license music for tuber video.
As for Mikes point about google sharing our info I agree and that makes me mad. This is a big point in Googles life. Will they become the next big evil which will happen if they share the data or will they fight this to the end and win undying user loyality?
How does this lawsuit benefit Viacom?
That YouTube data is extremely valuable for improving the service and in getting ads targeted more closely, so their clinging onto it makes perfect business sense from that perspective.
I blame the courts on this one, they should not let potentially private data get into a third party so easily, and if they do, Google should only be liable to provide statistics on clips viacom claims ownership, not all clips.
The reason Viacom will not go after any users is because there’s no money in it (and only bad PR). If they were that stupid, they wouldn’t be winning this lawsuit.
They are only going to go after Google, because that’s where the money is. Remember, YouTube is all about Google making money off of users’ videos (i.e the whole point of Web 2.0) – the users aren’t the ones making money, it’s the owner of the site that is. And that’s who Viacom will go after.
@ Miss UNIVERSE – You missed the point entirely. The CNET article says that the only way Google is going to agree to anonymize user info is if they get to anonymize employee info also.
That doesn’t sound very Googley.
I think this is the wrong point. If I’m not mistaken, the information Google keeps is standard. What isn’t standard is that Viacom has sued Google and a court ordered Google to turn over the standardly stored information. Blame the court or Viacom, but not Google.
@16: You’ve never heard of the RIAA?
Kevin, above, has the right point. Blaming Google is dumb. If any company Techcrunch has ever profiled were sued and told to hand over their registration records they would do so. Virtually all privacy policies on the web have an explicit “out” for court orders.
choradas, choradas y otra vez choradas……
Did someone not read the full press release?
The judge has order Viacom only to use the information for this lawsuit only. And if they violate this order, more then likely the lawyers involved in the law suit will loose the ability to practice law.
I’m a big privacy guy myself, that said I have to say that on the internet, you have zero privacy. Anyone with a legal need, can find out what you are doing. That includes not just Viacom, but also many entities you probably don’t think a lot about.
Your spouse in divorce court for instance . . . oh . . . you thought your little meetings were private. You shouldn’t have Google’d a hotel, and SMS’d your ‘friend’.
Your future employer is another example. You probably think that you can climb that ladder to a C-level position at a big bank or fortune 1000. Or maybe move ahead in the Foreign Service Office. Or you were certain you could make General in the military. Only you forgot that when you were young you had a big mouth, and made more comments than you should have about . . . say . . . blacks in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. You won’t even know why, you’ll just start running into a glass ceiling when you try to break through . . . say . . . the VP level. Certain large corporations will just not do business with you. This sort of thing is what we can expect. These are the saddest cases, because they will run into a new glass ceiling that they themselves made with their own SMS’s, emails, and forum posts.
I don’t even need to go into what’s going to happen to political candidates when their e-communications are scanned. And yes, they WILL be scanned.
Of course, the most worrying is that the government has access to all of these communications all of the time. They just gave the telecoms immunity for helping them collect this information so at this point, there are few options to keep what you say from coming back to haunt you. The best option seems to be to hope that you are never worth the compute cycles. That is, to live your life so that you never amount to much.
@18 Has the right perspective on this. I’m sorry but I don’t classify myself as a particularly “evil” person and I believe I live by a “don’t be evil” motto myself but if a court ordered me to turn over the logs of a community site I ran I would agree (maybe grudgingly).
You really think that a large company like Google could get away with NOT obeying a court order? Google hasn’t done anything wrong here (in respect to obeying a court of law), in fact, choosing your own laws by not obeying a court of law is surely a first step to being evil?
I guess what I’m saying is that given all of the implications of our lack of privacy, it is frustrating to me that people get up in arms because VIACOM might get their information.
Wait and see what happens when there is trouble with gmail some of the other g apps? If someone sends me an email with a picture attached that infringes copyrights, does that mean I am responsible since I’ve looked at the pic? There is an awful lot more info to pass on to viacom in that case…
It makes sense that Viacom is asking for YT employee access logs, as they would be able to argue that lack of action towards removing infringing videos (should they find any YT employee, moreso one with subject-related responsibilities, had watched an infringing video) makes for contributory infringement (maybe).
The truth is Google’s code of conduct originally read “Don’t be evil like us” but due to optimizations it was concatenated to “Don’t be evil like u”. Later QA efforts detected odd grammar and understandably substituted the phrase with “Don’t be evil”. The rest is history.
I really feel like Google did the best they could to defend the user information. Viacom only wants that information for another case they have against Google – so it’s not in Google’s best interest to hand over anything.
Can some one please tell me why having the viewer’s ip, user name, etc is such a concern? shouldn’t the uploaders of the content be more concerned about Viacom or other 3rd party having their ip, user name, etc?
Tibbs-
Walk away from the ledge. It’s going to be okay.
Deeeeeeeep Breath…..
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.
It doesn’t matter if Google wants to hand the data over or not, Viacom has a court order saying Google has to give them the data, it’s not Google’s fault and you shouldn’t be mad at them.
Google should print out the data and drive it over in a semi-truck to Viacom headquarters.
Or deliver it in a way that makes the data very hard to be used, such as breaking out the log files into a complex map that will have to be put together by hand or a sophisticated parsing program.
Google lied. Probably the business men decided, I doubt it came from the techies.
“Defendants do not refute that the “login ID is an anonymous pseudonym that users create for themselves when they sign up with YouTube” which without more “cannot identify specific individuals”.”
Defendants = Google
As Google know, and they know, a lot of people use their own name as their login ID. Google lied, and that my friend, is evil. Do no evil… well, you did.
You know what happened with Google ? They lied first to them-self to get permissions to put ads according to the analysis they perform on IP/userid etc… so they did’nt accept fact as they were, they wanted to change them to get more money, that was the first evil step. People did’nt care a lot back then about that kind of stuff, but now that they see where this is going, they do… and they do well.
Since Google is now evil, I think it’s the proper time to say
: “TIME TO ABANDON THE SHIP!”.
I won’t wait for an appeal or not, saying that login ID are anonymous and cannot identify specific individuals when clearly they are not, lying in my face like that, that’s enough.
And like Google are suppose to be the kings of the Internet, a lot of people will mindlessly believe them and listen to them, judges will make wrong laws based on wrong facts and that could change the face of the Internet in a wrong way.
Google you did evil.
I’m probably missing something: I would assume that Viacom wants data on (its) copyrighted material on YouTube, and, say, a timestamped record of each time they’ve been viewed. In this scenario there is no need for user data at all. What user data adds is data on the “purchasing” behavior of users, and related marketing-like data. I’d say that any data on individuals is on its face outside the needs of the lawsuit. Or maybe I’m missing something.
Google’s problem is that they want to keep all of your data in the hope that it might be useful someday. They don’t need your IP address, not now or ever. If they really see value in tracking IP addresses aprart from user logins it would be easy enough to ananymoize them by passing them through a 1-way hash. Much better to just throw them out though.
@#30 Brian,
Viacom is trying to make a case that “viewing” a copyrighted video on YouTube is also a crime, not just uploading. In their logic, “viewing” a clip of, say, “Colbert Report”, on YouTube will cause the viewers to have less desire to watch the show on TV, and as a result, they are losing money, which in their “Hollywood math” is worth $1 billion dollars.
Hollywood is an expert at producing not just celluloid fantasies, but also accounting “methods”. Ask any actor about the funny math on his residual checks, he’ll tell ya.
I don’t know about the copyright issues, but to compare this to the AOL R&D labs release of the search data is completely wrong.
Did Mike really head up Edgeio?
That comparison shows a lack of knowledge.
Google keeps everything. They save every search that has happened since day one. When you delete and email from Gmail they keep it for two years.
Such problems just start when things get abused.
Just a reminder that complying with the law isn’t necessarily the most enlightened thing to do. Think about how many companies just “comply” with environmental standards that often represent the least amount that you must do – not at all what you should do.
The same applies here. It’s surprising to me that anyone could look at this situation from any angle and find that the rights and privacy of users are being protected.
Where’s the suit to stop this from happening?
Mike the gist of your post suggests the key threat is to users who might get sued but this type of litigation seems a minor threat to me.
Isn’t Viacom after Google’s deep, deep pockets and also Viacom (rightly, wrongly, or foolishly aside) wants to inhibit the ability of others to monetize their stuff.
Seems to me this is an almost epic battle for control of content distribution rather than user rights, which are now protected not so much by legalities as by the fact you can’t sue the 100,000,000 people who have watched a bootlegged Viacom clip…..
Wait….there are some big, ugly ViacomCops knocking at my door right now…..
GOOG rolled over too quickly, and the fact they’re handing over data that is not already anonymized really irks me. My faith in this company continues to drop.
Wait…so it’s OK for Google to have ALL information about your viewing habits of Viacom videos, but not Viacom?
evan1138: Yes, you missed something, Viacom wants to prove that commercial stuff are more watched than original stuff on Google. They probably wrong about that and their way to prove it is questionnable.
Google keeps everything and nothing for nothing and everything, that’s something that should really be questionned too. Europeans have clear privacy laws unlike the USA, Americans are behind in term of privacy.
Btw, there’s a Viacom/Google petition at : http://www.peti...9/petition.html
google should add search eraser like ask.com. information they are gathering is time bomb ready to explode. won’t be surprised if some of their employee are already using it for personal or political reasons.
I agree with brain, If copyright material is the major concern. Then it should be banned or deleted from Youtube. Just like any abusive adult content.
Do no evil…
I read that on http://mashable...acom-youtube-2/
“Remember when Viacom promised that it had no intention of taking any (YouTube user) names following a court order that it be given records of the last few years of activity on the video megasite? Well now the content owner is including in its request information associated not only with folks outside the website’s employee base. Now it has supposedly made clear that it wants records of views and uploads done by insiders as well.
According to CNET’s Greg Sandoval, who references two unnamed sources, this is “the reason the two companies…have failed to reach a final agreement” on the data
”
OMG… so Google don’t care to give it as long they not included in it ?
The hypocrisy!!! DISGUSTING!
I and many others will boycott Google if they hand the data over. They should take it to the supreme court or lose the data. Our Government loses data all the time and they get away with it. If Google lost the data then they may have to pay a fine which would cost them a lot less then losing a lot of customers.