“This is not the first time Google has fought the disclosure of user information it had been stockpiling.”
This is a quote from a CNN article I read this morning about the most recent ruling in the Viacom vs. Google lawsuit, in which Viacom is asking for $1 billion in damages from Google because some of their copyrighted content has appeared on YouTube (owned by Google). Viacom has won a preliminary ruling in which they asked Google to provide a complete listing of all videos, who viewed them, and how many times. Google claims this is about 12 TB of information and will take months to gather.
The quote caught my eye, because I can see where Google might have been able to get out of providing the required information, had they not been “stockpiling” it in the first place. A few years back, right after 9/11, the FBI showed up on the college campus where I work, looking for information on a particular user of one of our stations who had sent a threatening email to my state’s governor. We did not have the information they requested, because we don’t keep any kind of logs of our users. We don’t record anything. They had the IP address of the computer in question, and we could tell them where that computer was (turns out it was in the student-use computer lab I manage), but that was pretty much all we could give them. They directed us to keep detailed records of who used what computer at what time, for at least 90 days.
You can imagine in a place of academic freedom this rankled quite a few people. The librarians were incensed. My boss and I were dismayed by the amount of work this would pile on us. Our college legal office attempted to nix the order on the grounds that it violated privacy. But in the end, we had to do as we were told; it was post-9/11, and everyone was on edge. Fortunately, after about a year of keeping the data as requested, our legal office had the order rescinded and we went back to our “don’t ask, don’t tell” ways and purged all information we had been keeping. If and when the FBI shows up again, we will have no records to show them.
But I’m sure Google has kept every tiny tidbit of information from day one. They have volumes and volumes of these records, which can easily be subpoenaed and used in any manner needed. Despite the fact that Viacom says it will not release the information or use it for anything other than the court case, I’m inclined to think that once the information is released by Google, it will be used in more than just the court case. If Google didn’t keep the records to begin with, there would be nothing to be breached/released.
I’m sure they have their reasons for keeping the information, and that it has to do with making money. I hope it was worth it for them to do so. And how safe, now, is login information for YouTube? I, my husband, and my two teenagers all have YouTube accounts, and I and my daughter upload home video all the time. All of us watch videos on a pretty regular basis. I can’t say whether we’ve watched anything that infringes or not, but I know I’ve watched videos of snippets of television shows or news reports, as well as home videos and self-made media.
Will Viacom take the further step of smacking everyone who has viewed infringed material once they’ve won their lawsuit against Google? After all, they will have the information on every user and what they’ve seen.
A pretty frightening thought, from my perspective.