Google told to hand over our YouTube Details.

Google told to hand over our YouTube Details.
Millions of people will have their log details handed over to Viacom in reaction to a ruling that the media and entertainment group that owns MTV, which filed a £504 million ($1 billion) lawsuit against YouTube (owned by Google) alleging copyright infringement.

The viewing habits of millions of users could could be handed over.

Although Google did say that the data would be restricted to lawyers and outside experts advising Viacom. I still get a rather unsettled feeling about this one and the old civil rights issue.
Kurt Opsahl, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online civil rights group, called the move a “setback to privacy rights”.

He said that disclosing the information could violate privacy laws, unless it was stripped of information that could tie videos to individual users.

Viacom’s general counsel called the EFF yesterday to discuss ways to remove such personally identifiable information contained in the user logs, according to the EFF. However, “anonymisation can be difficult”, Mr Opsahl said. “There are plenty of people who use their own name as a user ID.”
Catherine Lacavera, Google’s senior litigation counsel, said Google was “disappointed” by the ruling. She said Google would ask Viacom to “respect users’ privacy and allow us to anonymise the logs”.
In his ruling, US district judge Louis Stanton dismissed fears about the threat to user privacy as “speculative”. Ironically, he used arguments advanced in the past by Google itself to justify his decision, quoting from a company blog posting that claimed that “in most cases, an IP address without additional information” cannot be used to find the identity of a computer user.

Viacom said the data will be subject to a confidentiality order. “Viacom actually does not get to see any personally identifiable information – our outside counsel gets it, and is not permitted to share it with us,” it said.

I don’t know about you but I’m still not convinced and this could turn nasty at some stage.