More on Viacom v Google

The parties in the Viacom v Google suit have agreed on the outlines of the protocol they will use to provide the plaintiff with the record of YouTube video viewing patterns.  The parties agreed that Google will replace User ID, IP Address and Visitor ID with anonymous but unique identifiers. That is, they won’t tell you the IP address, but this scheme will allow anyone to identity what videos were viewed by specific individuals.  Supposedly the scheme makes these users anonymous, but in fact, it just makes it a bit more difficult to identify individuals.  This is exactly the approach taken by AOL in their ill-fated release of search information a few years ago.

Anyone who posted one of Viacom’s videos and one of their own could probably be immediately identified by comparing the unique, but random, ID assigned to the IP address and the user name.   The names of the video files will not be obscured.  If the plaintiff’s intentions are to determine how often their videos were viewed, they don’t need to uniquely identify the viewers.

I am somewhat surprised that Google would go along with such a plan.  There are many people at Google who understand perfectly well how to use the information that they are turning over and the implications of that information for YouTube’s users.   Many Googlers know perfectly well what happened to the AOL data.

Viacom has promised not to use the data to go after YouTube visitors, but, in that case, it is unclear why they need the detailed information in the first place.

This entry was posted on 15. July 2008 at 10:04 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.