Viacom, Google make YouTube privacy deal
By John Lister
Viacom has signed off on a deal to prevent it identifying individual users from the YouTube logs Google is handing over. In return, Google has agreed it won’t later claim that IP addresses or other information in the logs is a breach of privacy.
The court agreement (PDF link) makes legal Viacom’s offer to let Google mask personal details before supplying the logs. That followed fears the media giant might try to sue individuals who’d uploaded, or even downloaded, copyrighted information. Viacom has already denied it will do this.
The technical details are to be worked out over the next week, but will involve replacing each individual user ID and IP address with a number. This allows Viacom’s lawyers to see how individuals have used the site, but not to know who they are.
Viacom is looking at the data to see what proportion of viewing is of copyrighted material rather than home movies. If they can prove the majority is copyrighted, they believe it makes their ongoing case against Google stronger because it would rubbish the idea that the site’s purpose is fundamentally legit. The new data deal means that they will not only be able to break down the percentage of total views, but they’ll be able to say what proportion of individual users spend the majority of their time on the site watching copyrighted material.
In theory Viacom could still identify some users, for example if they had a pattern of looking at clips of videos featuring themselves, friends, family or colleagues. However, while this is a valid privacy concern in principle, in practice it seems particularly unlikely Viacom would both break its public promise not to pursue individuals, and go to the extreme effort of tracking people down in this way.
The agreement specifically does not address the ongoing argument about whether Viacom should be able to search through the viewing logs of YouTube employees. Doing so could achieve the legally important (if realistically ludicrous) goal of ‘proving’ YouTube staff were aware there were copyrighted clips on the site.
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