GOOGLE HAS run into a fresh storm over online privacy after a US judge ordered YouTube, its popular online video site, to hand over records detailing the viewing habits of its millions of users.
The ruling came in response to a demand by Viacom, the media and entertainment group and owner of MTV, which last year filed a $1 billion (€637 million) lawsuit against YouTube, alleging copyright infringement.
The order will force YouTube to give Viacom detailed computer logs with information about all the videos that have been viewed on site, along with the login information and computer addresses of all of its users.
That could allow Viacom to identify the specific videos viewed by the site's users, and potentially the computers on which they were viewed. The judge's decision was immediately criticised by advocates of online privacy.
"The court's erroneous ruling is a setback to privacy rights, and will allow Viacom to see what you are watching on YouTube," wrote Kurt Opsahl, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online civil rights group.
Catherine Lacavera, Google's senior litigation counsel, denounced Viacom's "overreaching demand for viewing history" and said Google was "disappointed" by the ruling. "We will ask Viacom to respect users' privacy and allow us to anonymise the logs before producing them under the court's order," she added.
US district judge Louis Stanton dismissed concerns about the threat to user privacy, branding them "speculative". Ironically, he used arguments advanced in the past by Google itself to justify his decision, quoting from a company blog posting that claimed "in most cases, an IP address without additional information" cannot be used to find the identity of a particular computer-user.
Viacom, the owner of MTV and creator of the Daily Show and other television shows popular with online audiences, filed its claim against YouTube last year, alleging that the site did not do enough to prevent its users from viewing clips of its copyrighted material.
The judge denied Viacom's request that it be given access to YouTube's source code, arguing that granting an outside company access to the site's inner workings would compromise trade secrets. - (Financial Times service)
