Watching Me… Watching You…

A-Ha. So, Google has been ordered to hand over details of everyone who has ever watched a YouTube video - and in the UK, that’s more than 11 million people in April alone – to a company who says they are infringing copyright with some of the clips. All-in-all, 12+ terabytes of data – which is a massive amount of data to be trawled through. There are a number of concerning point here… firstly, we are back to trying to decide whether an IP address is actually ‘a person’. For some YouTube viewers, they log in, so you can be relatively sure that they are who they say they are (providing that no-one else uses the machine, etc, etc), for everyone else, if you go through a DHCP server – then you cannot be sure, or rather they cannot be sure.

More worryingly is the fact that, yet again, the information that was collected for one purpose, has now been taken to be used for something different. So, while I might be ‘happy’ (and I use the inverted commas cynically) to have my IP address logged for Google to use – I am certainly not ‘happy’ that they can give the information to someone else. Perhaps they could anonymize it – to prevent any comeback? Something would have been better than nothing! As it is, this seems wrong – and will start to set a dangerous precedent for those companies who collect the information having to hand it out to others – who will then be able to do whatever they want with it. Even if this time, they decide not to go after individuals, who’s to say they won’t in three months? Perhaps three years?

July 7, 2008 | Filed Under Regulation, security 

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