Court Ruling Renders Google’s Privacy Policy Useless
A New York court ruling effectively renders Google’s privacy policy useless. Google, the owner of YouTube, must surrender all data about site visitors to YouTube:
“…Google must hand over all the information contained in its logging database, including the login ID of the users who have watched videos, the time they started to watch the video, users’ IP address, and the video identifier.”
link: Viacom Will Know What You’ve Watched on YouTube
This has long been acknowledged as one of the drawbacks of Google’s maintaining such an extensive and detailed data base. The individual identifiers could be obscured by proprietary algorithms if Google had a genuine intent to protect the site visitors’ identity.
The court ruling is troublesome along two major parameters. First is the obvious surrendering of data gathering that tracks the site visitors’ specific details. The second is that there are a lack of detailed, specific sanctions that governor how these data can be used. The ruling amply illustrates that the privacy of the site visitor is a very low priority, if it is even a consideration at all.
Catherine Forsythe
Tags: court ruling, data base, Google, privacy, YouTube
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