Judge Protects YouTube’s Source Code, Throws Users To The Wolves over at TechCrunch is the story I’m going to be talking about.
You know those Terms of service that you agree to when signing up for a service that says they keep your history and consider it an asset to the company? Well, a judge is making Google hand over your individual histories to Viacom. If you remember, Google and Viacom are in the middle of a billion dollar lawsuit over the uploading of copyrighted materials.
Here’s a quote:
That data includes every YouTube username, the associated IP address and the videos that user has watched on YouTube
When a judge makes an order like this it sets a precedent. I am now expecting to see more cases of a company turning over all user records to big media in copyright cases, so whatever privacy you thought you had online on these services, you can forget it.
As soon as the first lawsuit comes out over Facebook and Facebook is ordered to turn over all user histories, this will become a giant privacy issue. For some reason, people don’t think knowing that you watched both the Charlie unicorn and baby finger biting videos is a big deal.
Rob Blatt is the founder of Blattcave Productions, a podcast production company and studio in Brooklyn, NY and a community advocate for Blubrry.com. As an audio engineer, Rob contributed to productions that won three Emmy awards, one Oscar and one Peabody award. You can find his podcasts at blattcave.com and his resume at robblatt.info.