Your Secret Obsession With Cat Videos, Safe From Viacom?
Google has announced that it will turn over data revealing user’s usage habits on YouTUbe to Viacom as part of a lawsuit. YouTube and Viacom have announced a compromise, after YouTube balked at releasing customer information, that would see the user names “anonymized” before being turned over.
PC World however was quick to point out that anonymizing user names doesn’t protect users.
In the AOL case where 20 million search keywords for over 650,000 users over a 3-month period, that were intended for research purposes, was leaked to the Web, it didn’t take long before sleuths turned “numeric IDs” into real names. One was user 4417749 (AKA Thelma Arnold). Arnolds is the then 62-year-old woman who The New York Times correctly identified by examining her history of keyword searches.
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