Feels A Little Bit Backwards
Google has been ordered to turn over the full records of every video seen on YouTube, including the user names and IP addresses of all viewers. Privacy concerns were set aside because, hey, “in most cases” only knowing an IP address isn’t enough to identify someone so like, it’s probably not that big of a deal.
That’s what everyone’s talking about. The actual ruling mentions that Viacom had asked for, basically, Google’s search engine source code. Luckily for Google, they didn’t end up having to do that, because, hey, that would probably hurt Google’s business.
Not that I think that Google should have had to hand over its code. And there is the question of how relevant the code would be vs. the logs, and I’m not one to judge that question either. I just think it’s a bit funny as it comes across as basically, Google’s bottom line is worth more than our privacy.
I say Google should just apologize to Viacom and make sure this never happens again by removing Viacom material from YouTube and, hey while they are at it, delisting every Viacom related business from their search engine. I wonder how they would like that?
Then again, Viacom probably owns half of the media out there so they couldn’t be shunted aside that easily.
I hate the media industry.