Court Ruling Trashes Google’s Privacy Policy
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A New York court ruling effectively renders Google’s privacy policy useless. Google, the owner of YouTube, must surrender all data about site visitors to YouTube:
“…Google must hand over all the information contained in its logging database, including the login ID of the users who have watched videos, the time they started to watch the video, users’ IP address, and the video identifier.”
link: Viacom Will Know What You’ve Watched on YouTube
This has long been acknowledged as one of the drawbacks of Google’s maintaining such an extensive and detailed data base. The individual identifiers could be obscured by proprietary algorithms if Google had a genuine intent to protect the site visitors’ identity.
The court ruling is troublesome along two major parameters. First is the obvious surrendering of data gathering that tracks the site visitors’ specific details. The second is that there are a lack of detailed, specific sanctions that govern how these data can be used. The ruling amply illustrates that the privacy of the site visitor is a very low priority, if it is even a consideration at all.
Catherine Forsythe
2 Comments
leftystrat
July 3rd, 2008
at 4:31pm
What about if one doesn’t sign in and disables cookies?
Jerry
July 4th, 2008
at 7:51am
Well, geeks, why are you sitting there? With all the power of the Internet at your command, obviously you can get busy and build some fires under these sluggish-minded hangovers from the Dark Ages. A judge who appears to think that a wealthy and powerful organization should be able to spy on the people, he can be bypassed by a higher court. A huge company like Google, once people-friendly but now every-increasingly becoming just another arrogant beast, is really no more than another Internet bubble, and can probably be popped like any other bubble. It shouldn’t be hard to find out the email addresses of the courts, the legislators, the corporate executives, and convince them all that the old ways of repressive elitism and control are already gone now. The alternative is to have them gradually surround the Internet with a net of laws that benefit only the power-minded and the greedy corporations (yes, like Google).