Sunday, July 06, 2008
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Google Ordered to Turn Over YouTube User Data
Google Ordered to Turn Over YouTube User Data

The real hub of the decision handed down yesterday:
Yesterday, in the Viacom v. Google litigation, the federal court for
the Southern District of New York ordered Google to produce to Viacom
(over Google's objections):


"...all data from the Logging database concerning each time a YouTube
video has been viewed on the YouTube website or through embedding on a
third-party website..."

The court’s order grants Viacom's request and erroneously ignores the
protections of the federal Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), and
threatens to expose deeply private information about what videos are
watched by YouTube users. The VPPA passed after a newspaper disclosed
Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork's video rental records. As Congress
recognized, your selection of videos to watch is deeply personal and
deserves the strongest protection.

The Logging database contains:

     "....for each instance a video is watched, the unique “login ID”
of the user who watched it, the time when the user started to watch
the video, the internet protocol address other devices connected to
the internet use to identify the user’s computer (“IP address”), and
the identifier for the video."

[snip]



Even though the decision will almost certainly appealed, the fact that a judge ruled for Viacom indicates how badly we need to rationalize how copyright applies online.  It's frightening that the privacy rights of tens of millions of YouTube users matter so little.

If this decision stands, there would be nothing to prevent any content owner (in the US or elsewhere) from suing Goggle and getting the data Viacom is demanding.

--
One aspect apparently missed from both the Judge's ruling and the EFF's
analysis, is the degree to which YouTube username IDs can be readily and
mechanically linked via other online profiles to real world identities.

Hyperlinks from other 'social Web' sites (eg. FriendFeed, MyBlogLog) to
YouTube profile pages, particularly those that use the XFN microformat
HTML idioms, or FOAF markup, make it easier to find the people behind
the account IDs. And this gets easier with every passing month as more
such links are made, and as those sites offer more machine-readable
profile data. Furthermore, the links needn't be made by the profile
owner; the association can be made by friends, fans, contacts and stalkers.

Google themselves have offered a Web service API to just such data,
harvested and indexed from the public Web (their 'social graph API')
since early this year, which will return other profile URLs when fed a
YouTube profile URL that has incoming links from a FOAF or XFN-enabled
site that describes the connection. FWIW I posted an example, details
and links earlier in http://danbri.org/words/2008/07/03/359

An interesting scenario to consider here would be if an "anonymous"
account on YouTube were revealed in this dataset as uploading
copyrighted content without approval, yet the account's buddylist had
IDs that were linked via cross-site hyperlinks to profiles of
identifiable people.

Dan

--
Privacy Protection

Privacy Protection has to focus more limiting how people and institutions can
*use* personal information even as we recognize that it is harder and
harder to protect privacy by access control alone.

more detail: Information Accountability  CACM, June 2008
http://dig.csail.mit.edu/2008/06/info-accountability-cacm-weitzner.pdf

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