Google ordered to hand over all user data for youtube

G

Gacha

Stand User
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/20 ... ube.google

The internet giant Google is being forced to hand over the personal information of every person who has ever watched a video on the YouTube website as part of a billion-dollar court case in the US.

A judge in New York has ordered that Google, which owns YouTube, must pass on the details of more than 100 million people - many of them in the UK - to Viacom, the US broadcasting company which owns channels including MTV and Nickelodeon.
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Well i'm screwed.
 
Over the data protection and privacy acts i refuse them the right to pass my information on to a third party.

Its a breach of their T+C that they wont send personal information onto third parties.

In rights, those millions of people could take google to court. and google wouldn't have a leg to stand on.
 
Oh no, now the world will know that I can't stop watching terrible parody videos and Caramelldansen clips!

The sheer volume of garbage data that must be included in there makes my head twirl.

I wonder what would happen if Rick Astley tried to get money from everyone who clicked a rickroll link in the last year. Hehehe.

R
 
Yet another break in the Data Protection Act to fuel money wars. I'm not gonna say much on the subject coz it really annoys me that if Gacha hadn't posted this, I wouldn't have been non the wiser. Luckily, youtube viewers shouldn't have to supply personal information anyway. Most they'd get out of it is a random number and possibly the IP. Similar situations happening with BT and Virgin internet selling out their subscribers to market research without permission. But that's another sunject.
¬_¬
 
Voddas said:
Yet another break in the Data Protection Act to fuel money wars. I'm not gonna say much on the subject coz it really annoys me that if Gacha hadn't posted this, I wouldn't have been non the wiser. Luckily, youtube viewers shouldn't have to supply personal information anyway. Most they'd get out of it is a random number and possibly the IP. Similar situations happening with BT and Virgin internet selling out their subscribers to market research without permission. But that's another sunject.
¬_¬
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But i'd be outraged if i found out my IP address was being passed around,
this bulk of information is a haven for anyone who gets hold of some of it and wants to hack anyone in the world.
imagine what would happen if it all gets leaked (like everything else thats getting leaked recently....2 government cd's, child benefit information, official top secret documents left on a train) there'd be millions of people vunerable to hackers :(
 
Maybe, but every website you visit logs your IP already. Even if you only go to sites you trust there's a risk of giving out your IP to an unscrupulous site admin. So long as you practice good security as a matter of course (and yeah, many people don't...) there's nothing to worry about really with a court being handed some strings of numbers.

I think a lot of people are on dynamic IPs anyway so that aspect is more of interest to the ISPs than us. I'm on a static IP by request but confident that my important stuff is robustly protected at the moment.

R
 
Meh, I call your bluff.

If they were to do this, it would be against there terms & conditions. And, if they were to change them; You would have a warning that from then on your info would be tracked.

Also, the lawsuit is being carried out by Viacom, a tv broadcasting company. They are probably doing it to attempt to stop the piracy of their shows clips being shared, illegally, on youtube; This kind of stuff hits youtube all the time, I doubt it will effect them this time.

As for "personal info being given out", I think your email and the list of videos you have watched is hardly 'personal'. Your email address is everywhere, and who cares if these companies see what videos we watch? They will be seeing 100million+ aswell.

The data will include unique internet addresses, email accounts and the history of every video watched on the website, giving Viacom's experts the ability to conduct a detailed examination of the viewing habits of millions of people around the world.
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The quote also suggests that they will be using it to "examine the viewing habits of millions of people"; How do you know this isn't a good thing? Maybe they want to see which genres of videos are most viewed so they can focus advertisement and shows in them areas?

P.S : Most ip's wont show loads of information. Most of the time the information held is a small bit of information (your town, country and isp).
 
No T&C / contract / whatever overwrites the law. Data Protection Act says that my personal data should not be disclosure, so unless a court in here rules that that data should be used in any criminal investigation, we should be protected. Surely, personal data from non-american citizens should not be passed, otherwise, google / youtube should be simply banned from all countries other than USA...
Anyway, this whole copyright things is getting more and more ridiculous each time... =(
What I fid most ridiculous is that they actually believe that each download made is a sale lost, the way things are going, it would be better to ban the internet altogether... oops, knock on wood...
 
They get information on your IP, your ISP then has to give them anything more. In which the data protection act or similar law from your country of origin is invoked. An IP alone is not enough to know your personal data. However if you log in this may have some way of tracing you without needing ISP's to help.
 
Just another thing in the long line of American liberties being taken away, its becoming more and more like a police state over there every day.
Its actually quite disgusting the kind of laws being passed over there.
 
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