Google Wins Agreement To Anonymize YouTube Logs 242
Barence, following up on yesterday's news that Viacom is looking for videos uploaded by Google staff, links to an article at PC Pro, excerpting: "Google and Viacom have reached a deal to protect the privacy of millions of YouTube watchers. Earlier this month, a New York federal judge ordered Google to turn over YouTube user data to Viacom and other plaintiffs to help them prepare a confidential study of what they argue are vast piracy violations on the video-sharing site. Google claims it had now agreed to provide plaintiffs' attorneys with a version of a massive viewership database that blanks out YouTube usernames and IP addresses that could be used to identify individual video watchers."
Re:Okay then, what's the point? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:subject (Score:5, Informative)
No, there was a recent ruling that a torrent site had to start keeping records in response to a subpoena.
IANAL, but I believe the issues was as follows. Basically, a subpoena cannot be used to force you to start keeping records you otherwise would not (otherwise, imagine the subpoenas over MS's coffee drank allocated to line of code), it can only force you to retain records you create anyway. The torrent site claimed that they never kept records. The plantiff claimed that they kept records in RAM for the purpose of actually running the torrent, and that recording those logs counted as a reasonable imposition for a subpoena.
Payment in advance (Score:5, Informative)
With internet ad income the producers would need to finance everything in advance and then just hope the money trickles in over time. There are also issues with advertising. Does an advertiser prefer to air his ads on certain timeslots on tv OR god knows when on a user screen? People on slashdot seem a bit to fond of new tech to be able to see the many difficulties internet ads bring.
TV is also a onetime affair. Want to watch it again, buy the DVD. If it is always available on the internet, why buy the DVD? If you think ad revenues way up against dvd sales, you are just silly.
Re:subject (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, if you RTFA you'll find that YouTube/Google staff are not part of this agreement and their full data will be included. So they are not protecting themselves at all with this one.
Re:subject (Score:4, Informative)
for some more background on how much trouble you can harvest from supposedly anonimized data:
http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2006/08/21/aol-cto-resigns-two-researchers-fired/ [umbc.edu]
(sure, that's aol, and it was publicised and google will never (I hope!) do something this stupid but even anonimized data is not without risks, the fact they have to share this data with viacom does not make me happy, it sets a really bad precedent).
Google claims they use the history to be able to target ads more precisely but I really don't see why a few % extra revenue would be worth the liability.
So, your privacy policy no longer matters one bit because any group suing you to disclose that information does not have such a policy agreement with the customers of the party sued.
Re:Not as it seems (Score:3, Informative)
They've got their own site, Hulu.
And not only is it successful, but apparently they've already sold all advertising for the time being.
Hulu probably is the wave of the near future for large media companies on the internet. I can't say I'm upset, as the site is actually usable.