Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 15 July 2008 14:07
Business IT -
Networking
Page 1 of 2
Your YouTube viewing history is safe from the prying eyes of Viacom and the other companies suing Google, at least for now. Despite a recent court order backing a Viacom demand for YouTube to hand over complete user viewing history records, Viacom and its confederates have partially backed off.
The parties to the case have agreed that YouTube's logs can be anonymised. It will still be possible to determine which clips a particular user has viewed, but the copy of the database provided to the plaintiffs will not contain the information that would allow users to be identified.
"Viacom and the other litigants have backed off their demand for YouTube user viewing histories," said Rob Shilkin, Google's head of corporate communications and public affairs for Australia and New Zealand. "We have reached agreement to anonymise the data," he added.
Legal representatives of Viacom, Comedy Partners, Country Music Television, Paramount Pictures, Black Entertainment Television, The Football Association Premier League, Bourne, Murbo Music Publishing, Cherry Lane Music Publishing, Los Angeles News Service, X-Ray Dog Music, the French Tennis Federation, The Scottish Premier League, Cal IV Entertainment, the National Music Publishers Association, Rodgers & Hammerstein Organisation, Stage Three Music, Edward B Marks Music, Bienstock Publishing, Alley Music, Music Force, Sin-Drom Records, and prospective participants in a class action against Google and YouTube have all agreed to the plan.
What's more, they've also agreed not to try to undo the anonymisation - but in return, Google and its subsidiary YouTube are not allowed to use the original logs in connection with the suit unless those versions are also provided to the plaintiffs. This means there's a sting in the tail of Google's partial victory for anyone worried about having their YouTube viewing history uncovered.
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