Privacy policy bites Google in the behind
The story has gone something like this:
Google: “You don’t need to have any privacy concerns about the IP addresses that we store — they aren’t personally identifying.”
Viacom: “Okay, then, give us your user logs.”
Google: “No! That’s a violation of privacy!”
Judge: “But you just said…”
We all know that people can figure out who we are based on our activity. A person living at 123 Main Street who works at the power company, exercises at Bally’s, and drinks coffee at the Starbuck’s on 23rd and Vine doesn’t have much of a secret identity, even if I don’t tell you her name.
If you claim on the one hand that your data don’t hold any privacy implications, it stands to reason there shouldn’t be a problem if those same data are released. The fact of the matter is, there are privacy considerations when you’re dealing with people’s search queries or video preferences.
This isn’t the first negative tone I’ve heard towards Google in recent days. They’re getting slammed for hiking the price of day care. They’re getting blamed for fostering obscenity. A Valley bigwig says the company is an effing train wreck.
I’m confident the truth, as always, is more complex and multifaceted than these articles portray. Part of it is indicative of the sheer size of the company: grow enough over a long enough period of time, and folks will find something to complain about. Part of it is demonstrative of the stratospheric expectations they’ve set. Part of it is that they face the same microscopic level of scrutiny as a candidate for President.
When it comes to privacy, however, they’re learning that they can’t have it both ways. People are giving the judge a hard time for not understanding the implications of his order, but the judge was following irrefutable logic, based on Google’s own claims, policy, and videos.
What do you think of the Viacom-YouTube-Google privacy porridge?
July 24th, 2008 at 5:12 am
The only reason that Viacom has put forth so far on why YouTube should be exempt from this law is that the infringement in question takes place on a “massive scale”. However, there’s no exemption in the law for scale, and besides, several of the cases where safe harbor has been successfully invoked involved crime on a very large scale indeed. So it seems likely based on the available precedent that Viacom will not prevail. But maybe, by getting this list, they already have.