Slashdot Mirror
Finding Fault With Google's Privacy Policy
orenh writes "Viacom has recently obtained a court order that requires Google to hand over a complete list of every video watched by YouTube users. These logs will include the login names and IP addresses of the users. Google are now asking Viacom if they can anonymize the logs before turning them over; Viacom hasn't responded yet. But this privacy nightmare could have been greatly reduced if Google had anonymized the data in advance. Google's privacy policy states that they keep personally identifiable information for 18 months. There is no real reason to do so; Google can achieve everything they need even if they anonymize their search logs after just one month, and it's time users told them to do so."
...why keep identifiable logs in the first place?
The problem is that we I.T. people are Data Hoarders. Even if the data isn't useful today, or at all useful into the foreseeable future, we still hang on to it. And we save every detail we can just to prove how clever we are to have been able to discover it in the first place. (Note: P2P program writers are the same, and that's how Media Sentry can tell you so much about filesharers they discover on the Internet right down to the full directory paths of files.) Now if storage wasn't so d@mn cheap we wouldn't have this habit, but Moore's Law applied to disc drives means we no longer have to store 2-digit years and have Y2K problems. We have these problems now instead.
This is why the RIAA is able to use IP addresses combined with timestamps to identify ISP account holders. It doesn't identify any actual copyright infringers, but they don't care as long as they have somebody to sue. If these logs were deleted after 3 days this whole RIAA mess would have been a non-starter.
We just have this compulsion to hang onto everything because we can, and perhaps with the faint hope that somewhere down the line we'll be able to show extreme cleverness to our PHB's when they ask some inane question like, "Duh, how many unique IP addresses have accessed our website since 1991?" and we'll be able to say, "Give me 10 minute and I'll let you know (wag tail)."
Chances are that Google themselves has never had to follow-up on an IP address to identify a user for anyone except the Chinese government and/or the NSA, neither of which are our friends. The first poster who asks why they keep this at all, let alone weren't anonymizing it long ago has it right. This is hardly the first time Google has had to turn over access records so they certainly know that it can and will happen.
Don't be evil at Google seems to mean don't destroy data you never needed in the first place in the event that some government we want to keep as our friend might want it. But now we find out that more than just governments can get to it with baseless suits and moronic judges.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Google clearly should have anticipated this. Governments have requested/required info on individual users before, as has been posted many times to /. For some countries, Google even moved user data off-shore, to protect it. Privacy advocates warned of this problem happening.
Google's rule is 'don't be evil', as long as it doesn't interfere with business.
But the problem isn't Google, it's us. We keep using Google, though we knew about the risks and problems. The day a company risks significant revenue over privacy, is the day they will pay attention to it.
We have met the enemy and he is us.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogo_(comics)#.22We_have_met_the_enemy.....22
This is the scary thing about the direction things are going in the world, with the Internet in particular. The Internet was supposed to be the vast equalizer, but instead, with all kinds of clueless governments and corporate overlords who dream up ways to take advantage of people, the Internet is turning into another tool for the powerful to control the masses. This example with Viacom and YouTube is one good example. It's obvious to me that they obtained the court order to get the information on every YouTube video watched for only one reason: To count how many videos they claim violate their copyrights, add up how many times each of these videos was watched, and show the court, "You see?! Our priceless valuable intellectual property, so valuable in fact that without it, the Universe would cease to exist, has been illegally watched 9,578,739,458,797,245,858,274 times on YouTube. This is irrefutable proof that because YouTube exists, we have lost 9,578,739,458,797,245,858,274 sales of our products at $19.95 each, so our damages due to Google's obviously ill intent come to $19,109,585,220,300,000,000,000,000.95 USD." Never mind that their sales over their entire existence as a company have never reached one percent of that. Now who knows how the privacy implications will affect users beyond that. Once they get all of Google's assets to cover their huge damages, they'll probably track down each and every user and sue them too, a la the RIAA and SCO. A bigger issue than privacy to look at is what happens when a company whose business model is outdated and falling apart turns to lawsuits instead of figuring out new and innovative ways to stay in business, much like how a bully in school beats up kids one tenth his size instead of making friends and getting a life.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
That didn't mean much to one European BitTorrent tracker site who was ordered by U.S. judges to turn over all access logs where the site didn't even keep logs to start with. The judge said in his infinite wisdom that because the data existed in RAM at some instant that the logs were required to be created and then turned over.
While I respect the USA law within the USA, I despise when judges attempt, often with too much success, to enforce it outside of the USA. And not just data laws. We enforce US sex laws in other countries to criminalize behavior completely legal there. This Is Wrong!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
so that they can hand everyone's personal info over to Mossad.
> Google has just been stupid here about privacy, and now it's coming home to roost in a very public way.
This is true, but it's not the worst of it.
Much, *MUCH* worse is that the judge has imposed on Google a legal ruling that the RIAA must be wetting themselves to obtain. And of course, these records will go straight to the MPAA, despite the contraints placed on their use.
This is either a case of extreme naivete on the part of the judge in ignoring the privacy ramifications in his incredible ruling, or quite possibly a simple case of corruption. Such naivete would be so incredible in a judge that isn't senile, that corruption has to be far more likely.
As for Google, their lawyers should have IMMEDIATELY said to the judge "Our client cannot do that, on privacy grounds. Google's duty to protect the privacy of millions cannot be dismissed by a legal ruling." Judges are not omnipotent, even when some of them think they are.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Why would the **AA sue me? I've never uploaded, downloaded, or sideloaded any of their stuff. They have nothing I want. If they sue me it will be because they fucked up and confounded me with someone else.
I guess you missed the many, many slashdot articles about them doing exactly that.
Huh ?
News papers : People don't know what you are reading
Radio : People don't know what you are listening
TV : People don't know what you are watching
And now... you want it to be different for the Internet? Or do you ?
Just a sec while I sharpen up my rusty old axe...
If privacy is to have any meaning, then we need a right to protect our personal information. Well, actually we already have the right, though it's a bit scattered around the Bill of Rights. (Speaking for Americans, and only in theoretical terms as regards the current administration.)
So what's the strongest form of protection for our personal information? The famous "possession is 9 points of the law". We should possess our personal information and we should have to right to say who can see it, and when.
Concretely in Google's case, they should offer privacy options whereby all of your personal information would be stored only on your machine. They could still access it, but they'd have to respect your privacy preferences--and you could always change your mind. (Of course the data should be signed to prevent you from tampering with it, but that's a relatively trivial aspect.) I feel like this approach is the only thing that would really give meaning to privacy in the computer age.
(However, some people would no doubt trade away their privacy for coupon discounts or whatever--but right now we have no choice. Lots of companies (and of course including Google) collect lots of our personal information and treat it like *THEIR* property when it should belong to *US*.)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
As someone with a couple of boys I am all for protecting kids but frankly this insanity has got to stop. There has even been cases where parents have been harassed for having those nude baby pictures that ALL parents just love to harass their kids with. IMHO it has become a classic case of having to show you are doing something,even if the something is completely wrong. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV.
Oh,and I know this part is offtopic,but has slashdot changed its code recently? I do the p and br with the brackets as I have always done to separate a paragraph and now all it does is indent it. I am afraid I am a pc repairman not an HTML guy,so I have no clue as to what to change it to. Any suggestions?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Seriously, we need an organization that will make it a standard to collect _zero_ logs.
So a hot link to this organization would be linked on the page displaying that this site does actually respect your privacy by not logging anything to begin with.
Privacy statements are idle words meaning nothing, you don't need analytics on your site, you don't need cookies that last for more than 12 hours to preserve state.
If your site is valuable enough people will pay to visit it, if it isn't at that threshold work harder and offer something they will pay for.
This hideous tracking bullshit must stop, I am about to make entries in my privoxy setup for anything not critical to the display of website information.
I am an SA and I can tell you how often dev's endless log spew is handy at all......almost never.
I can tell you that log spew is invaluable for the marketdroids to find and correlate your visits however, just so they can measure you and possibly resell that information.
What you said. Same deal -- the Genarlow Wilson case obviously wasn't enough of a wake-up call in the USA about how draconian its sex laws are.
Here's a clue to those not paying attention -- two highschool kids having sex are criminals in most of the USA (unless they both failed a lot of grades).
Should sex with children be illegal? Yes. Should consensual sex between 17 yr olds be illegal? How about 16? Why is there a big line drawn at 18, 19 or 21 (in some states) way above the 50th percentile of sex activity in America?
(35% of kids have had sex by 13 in America, if you don't like it, laws against it won't help, try talking to your kids about sex before they have a kid instead).
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)