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Court Ruling Releases YouTube Users’ Private Data

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Jul 3, 2008 

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Kathleen  |

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Court Ruling Releases YouTube Users’ Private Data

ADOTAS – The ongoing YouTube copyright suit is rearing its ugly head again – and now YouTube users could be affected. Privacy advocates are aflutter.

This week, Manhattan District Judge Louis Stanton handed Google two partial victories in the $1 billion suit. The judge is ordering Google to turn over user data to Viacom. That includes usernames, associated IP addresses, videos watched on YouTube, every video yanked from YouTube for any reason.

The judge did deny Viacom’s request for Google to fork over YouTube source code.

The argument? Privacy concerns over user data are “speculative,” while the source code’s leak could cause Google “competitive harm.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is up in arms saying that Judge Stanton “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 foundation goes on to say that in addition to the fact that the court’s ruling may be in violation of federal law, “the Court may not order the production of ‘personally identifiable information’” – which as we all know, most YouTube videos contain in excess.

Several industry observers are raising the specter of the infamous AOL search history debacle of ’06 in which 20 million online searches from 650,000 AOL users were released. (Along with names, addresses, social security numbers, etc.)

Tags: AOL, court-ruling, Google, internet-advertising-news, privacy, viacom, Video-Privacy-Protection-Act and youtube

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