Google Inc. has been ordered to disclose reams of data detailing the personal video-watching habits of YouTube users in a landmark court decision that critics say could potentially identify millions of people around the world and erodes expectations of privacy on the Internet.
Yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge Louis Stanton ordered Google, the search engine giant that owns YouTube.com, to hand over records detailing every video watched by YouTube users and when they were watched to Viacom Inc. as part of the cable company's $1-billion (U.S.) lawsuit against the tech titan.
Privacy advocates on both sides of the border say the judge's decision sets a dangerous precedent about who should have access to the user data Google keeps in its vast warehouses of servers, and could lead to personal information falling into the wrong hands.
Although the case is being heard in U.S. court, the judge set no specific geographic limitations on the data Google must produce, meaning user names and Internet protocol (IP) addresses of millions of Canadians and other YouTube users outside the U.S. could also be at risk.
Viacom Inc.
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"We are disappointed the court granted Viacom's overreaching demand for viewing history," Google's senior litigation counsel Catherine Lacavera said in an e-mail. "We will ask Viacom to respect users' privacy and allow us to anonymize the logs before producing them under the court's order."
Viacom — which owns the MTV and Comedy Central television networks — and a group of other parties are suing Google for allowing clips of copyrighted videos to appear on YouTube.
The information in Google's databases is crucial to Viacom proving that its copyrighted videos — which include clips from television programs such as South Park and The Colbert Report — are more popular than user-generated clips on YouTube, the world's most popular video-sharing site.
The New York-based media conglomerate says the data it receives will be used only for the purpose of proving its case against Google, and that it will not seek to identify any individuals.
Although the judge cited a post on the Official Google Blog, which stated that in most cases an IP address and user name aren't enough to identify a user, that assertion isn't entirely accurate, according to Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University and an expert in digital privacy.
Many people include parts of their name, their birthday or other personal information in their user IDs on the Internet, which could be used to identify a user, he said.
"The court was wrong in thinking that user IDs are not personally identifiable," he said. "I assume this will go to a court of appeals and I suspect it will be reversed under the Video Privacy Protection Act. Viacom doesn't need most of this information, they really only need the parts relating to Viacom, so this order strikes me as incredibly over-broad."
Google has not said whether it will appeal. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company had argued that releasing the data would amount to an invasion of its users' privacy; the judge, however, dismissed that notion as "speculative." Google's database keeps track of when each video is watched and the user ID and IP address of the viewer.
Google said collecting the 12-terabytes of data — equivalent to 12,000 1 GB memory cards — Viacom has requested would be both time consuming and expensive.
However, the judge seems to have ignored elements of the U.S. VPPA — which was enacted to keep individuals' video-renting histories private — in making his ruling, said University of Ottawa e-commerce law professor Michael Geist.
"It's sending shockwaves around the Internet," he said. "The very notion that such detailed personal information could be forcibly divulged by YouTube runs counter to the expectations of users and presents a huge privacy hole for many."
Google purchased YouTube in 2006 for $1.65-billion (U.S.) and watched it grow into the largest video website on the Internet, with more than 70 million users in the U.S. alone and 2.5 billion videos watched around the globe every month.
Viacom had also sought access to Google's computer source code, the secret sauce that powers the search functions on both YouTube and Google.com, the company's search engine. The judge denied that request.
The judge ruled that disclosing Google's source code could cause "catastrophic competitive harm" to the company. He also denied a request for Google to produce the code it uses to scan for copyrighted material. Viacom wanted to use it to show what Google could be doing to combat piracy, but isn't.
With a report from The Associated Press