YouTube user data to be shared with Viacom

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YouTube user data to be shared with Viacom

Added Monday 14/07/2008

Last Tuesday a US court ruled that search giant Google must reveal the viewing habits of every person who has ever used YouTube. The case has many ramifications for the future of privacy on the internet and the legal process surrounding it.

The billion dollar lawsuit launched by Viacom Inc. seeks to prove the majority of videos watched through YouTube contain copyrighted material and thus Google's advertising revenue generated through the site is based on mass copyright infringement.

Viacom has pledged "unequivocally" not to use the 12 terabytes of data to learn the real names of YouTube users in order to sue them for uploading unauthorized clips, as the RIAA has done to people who illegally shared music online. It's understandable that Viacom seek to protect its individual copyright holders but at the expense of user's privacy? The question remains, why does Viacom need individual user information to mount their case? Surely all they need is the overall trends of usage, in terms of uploading and viewing. As expected Viacom have since received considerable backlash from the YouTube community, calling for a boycott against popular shows aired through their subsidiaries including MTV and Comedy Central. This is reminiscent of the backlash Metallica suffered after targeting fans illegally downloading their material in the Napster era. It's worth noting that other media giants such as Fox, CBS and Universal aren't taking legal action against YouTube but in fact have deals with the site under which they can share in any advertising revenue generated by their content. YouTube has a sophisticated video identification system to help owners like Viacom quickly identify and remove infringing content.

The interesting thing about Judge Stanton's ruling is that the US Government were denied a similar request a couple of years ago. "[Stanton's order] seems to run afoul of the Video Privacy Protection Act, which says that if you're trying to obtain these kinds of records, you must give subscribers or users notice," said Matt Zimmerman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a well-known net watchdog. It's more than a little unsettling that a US judge can abolish the privacy protections defined in user agreement at whim, especially those concerning many non-US citizens. The case could potentially open the floodgates to copyright plaintiffs seeking log files as a means to obtain and data mine valuable marketing data.

Google had objected to Viacom's request for the data, arguing that it would violate users' privacy. But this is somewhat of a backflip from their previous claims that IP addresses aren't personally identifiable information. This has rekindled the debate on just how personal an IP address is?

In Europe, regulators decided in February that the addresses were personal data subject to significant protection. Google claims that because ISP's commonly assign dynamic IP addresses a user's internet session cannot be reliably linked to an identity. However dynamic IP's these days aren't so dynamic due to most households using wireless ADSL modems / routers that are connected 24/7 and thereby maintaining an IP address for several weeks or even months. Dynamic IPs may become more uncommon as we move to the IPv6 environment, which has plenty of address space to uniquely identify devices. Combining an IP address with a timestamp and URL undoubtedly constitutes personal information. Courts could then subpoena this information in much the same way they can subpoena information from YouTube. Taking this thought a little further it's theoretically possible to perform a reverse DNS on an IP address to obtain a domain name which followed by a whois, gives a name and business address.

That scenario may sound a little extreme and no doubt many YouTube users couldn't care less whether Viacom know their viewing habits. What's important is that this ruling does not set a precedent for corporations seeking the commercial goldmines that are search engine logs . And with another data loss scandal seemingly exposed every week I'll continue to wear my tin-foil hat.