Privacy? Not if you're on YouTube

What happened? A US Federal Judge in California ruled that Google would have to hand over all user logs of people’s video viewing on YouTube to media company Viacom. Google bought YouTube in 2005.

Why? Viacom has filed a $1-billion (Rs 4,300 crore) lawsuit against Google claiming that YouTube’s popularity depends on copyrighted material, including content from Viacom’s channels such as Comedy Central and Nickelodeon.

What will happen now? Google will turn over logs of all users who have ever watched a video on YouTube. That’s colossal amounts of data, since it is believed that almost every regular user on the Internet has seen a video on YouTube at least once. In May, over one billion videos were watched on YouTube.

And then? The data, which is expected to be anonymised, will be studied to see if “infringing” videos really do form the bulk of YouTube’s traffic.

What about privacy? Privacy advocates have long targeted Google for having too much information about its users and are touting this as a “I told you so” moment since YouTube always contained infringing material.

—KM