Want to clear your viewing history on YouTube? Good luck
From LATimes:
As our Technology blog reported yesterday, YouTube and Viacom have reached an agreement on the controversial user privacy issue of last week.
In a stipulation issued by the court, the two parties agreed that all data from YouTube user logs would be anonymized — that is, the IP addresses and user names would be removed from all viewing data and substituted with placeholder values. Translation: Now, no Viacom employees or outside legal experts will know it was me who watched Miss USA fall down 300 times in a row last night.
But the real subtext of this controversy has taken a few days to bubble to the surface. Google may have narrowly maneuvered out of the potential PR disaster, but who’s to say there won’t be another company suing them for their logs next week? In 2006, the Justice Department subpoenaed Google for two months’ worth of search data. Google fought, and won, like they did this time. But the streak has to end sometime.