On July 2, US District Judge Louis Stanton lobbed a grenade into the cozy world of social networking, user-generated content and so-called “cloud” computing. He ordered Google to turn over to Viacom all of its logs relating to viewing of YouTube video clips since the search engine giant acquired the video hosting site in November 2006.
That amounts to 12 terabytes (or more than 12 million megabytes) of data: Each log entry records the user name and IP (machine) address of the user who viewed the video, plus a timestamp and a code identifying the clip. What the judgment means is that if you have watched a YouTube clip at any time since November 2006, a record of that will be passed to Viacom’s lawyers.
On the face of it, this looks like a massive breach of user privacy. The result is widespread alarm all round the world. There are a lot of sensitivities surrounding YouTube videos — and not just in Islamic countries. So everyone involved in the Google-Viacom case has been making soothing noises.
Viacom told the judge that “the login ID is an anonymous pseudonym that users create for themselves when they sign up with YouTube” which “cannot identify specific individuals.”
Stanton noted this assertion — and also the fact that Google did not refute it. He went on to quote a blog posted by a Google employee, Alma Whitten, saying that “in most cases, an IP address without additional information cannot [identify a particular user]” — as if this supported the Viacom assertion.
But in fact, Whitten pointed out, the situation is more complicated. IP addresses contain personal information that in some cases allows personal identification and in others does not. And several expert commentators have pointed out that the assertion that login names do not reveal personal identities is also questionable.
So it looks as though the judge made his decision on grounds that are less secure than he had supposed. The truth is that, given sufficient resources and a legal justification, it’s often possible to link an IP address to a named individual. Indeed, that is the basis under which Virgin Media, a UK Internet service provider, is acceding to the demands of the BPI (formerly known as the British Phonographic Industry) to disconnect subscribers suspected of sharing copyrighted music online.
Viacom is clearly alarmed by the hornet’s nest that its lawyers have disturbed and is dispensing reassurance. Jeremy Zweig, the company’s vice president for media and editorial, said last week that it was interested merely in patterns of YouTube viewing, not in the online behavior of individual users.
“Viacom is not looking to identify any particular end-user, let alone discover what he may be watching,” he wrote in a blog post. “The logs will be subject to an extraordinarily high security and confidentiality threshold, and the raw data won’t be accessible to Viacom.”
I believe him but — given the aggressive behavior of copyright owners — thousands of other people won’t.
Whatever happens in the Google-Viacom case, this has been a wake-up call for Internet users. It is, as Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (Epic), put it, one of those “I told you so” moments. We are moving inexorably into a world dominated by “loud computing” in which most of us get services such as e-mail, word processing, data storage and hosting from huge server farms operated by companies like Google, Amazon, Yahoo and Microsoft.
As a result, colossal amounts of private data are now held on these companies’ computers. But the implication of Stanton’s decision is that all that information can, at the stroke of a judicial pen, be handed over to third parties.
Or as British Broadcasting Corp journalist Rory Cellan-Jones put it, the Google-Viacom case shows that we have no real control over our data once it is lodged on a corporate server.
“Every detail of my viewing activities over the years — the times I’ve watched videos in the office, the clips of colleagues making idiots of themselves, the unauthorized clip of goals from a Premier League game — is contained in those YouTube logs ... I may protest that I am a British citizen and that the judge has no business giving some foreign company a window on my world. No use — my data is in California, and it belongs to Google, not me,” he said.
To date, Cellan-Jones said, he has never worried too much about the threat to his privacy.
“I’m relaxed about appearing on CCTV, happy enough for my data to be used for marketing purposes, as long as I’ve ticked a box, and never really cared that Google knows about every search I’ve done for the past 18 months. But suddenly I’m feeling a little less confident. How about you?” he said.
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