Court Orders Invasion of Privacy!

Source: "YouTube Ordered To Release User Data: Viacom Had Sought Access to Database In Copyright Battle," by Ellen Nakashima, The Washington Post, July 4, 2008.

A U.S. federal judge in New York this week ordered YouTube to release data on the viewing habits of its tens of millions of worldwide viewers to Viacom, the media company that owns large cable networks such as MTV, VH1 and Nickelodeon.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton granted Viacom's request that YouTube release its 12-terabyte "logging" database -- a database that is larger than the Library of Congress's collection of about 10 million books, to Viacom. Every minute, 13 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube servers. The site logs hundreds of millions of views a week.

The database contains the unique login ID of the viewer, the time he began watching, the Internet Protocol, or IP, address of the user's computer and the identification of the video. That database is the only existing record of how often each video has been viewed during various time periods, the opinion said. Its data can recreate the number of views of a video for any particular day.

In ordering the data release, Stanton said that YouTube's privacy concerns were "speculative," that Google cited "no authority barring them from disclosing such information in civil discovery proceedings" and that Google itself has noted that an IP address without additional information cannot in most cases identify a person.

The ruling would seem to disregard the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act's protection against people's video-viewing habits from being disclosed. "The law says that records may not be turned over unless the consumer is given the opportunity to object."

The article also states:

Jennifer Urban, a law professor at the University of Southern California, said that even if Viacom does not use the information to sue users, "a future litigant may not keep the information private."

What videos people view, what books they read, have long been considered sensitive information, she said, "intensely personal pieces of information we expect people to be able to keep private."

Comment: We need to protect our privacy both by law, and by those who would disregard the laws that are passed. Even if, as seems likely, the firms involved will try to protect the data and the ruling was made in ignorance of the applicable law, there is a possibility of misuse of the data not to mention a precedent that is set. JAD