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.
Mike and Elisabeth will be in San Francisco today at SummerMash San Francisco and Social Media Camp. We’ll see you there.
Canada.com is carrying a story today about Bell. Bell Canada, under fire for its use of deep packet inspection technology, states in a submission to the CTRC that it only uses the technology to see the kind of data being transmitted, not its contents. Bell continues to be the subject of criticism including allegations that Bell is throttling P2P as way to avoid upgrading its network and giving its own services, like its new online video store, preferential treatment.
Click here for the full article from Roberto Rocha.
It Does Compute has a fantastic post that explains how spammers use your email address to send out email to avoid spam filters.
A friend recently asked me a question about email messages. He wanted to know why he was receiving notifications that his email was “undeliverable†to person “xyz†when he doesn’t even know “xyz†and insists he never sent the message. So what happened? Did his computer get hacked? Did he get a virus? Probably not. This is a symptom of a clever trick used by spammers.
The Washington Post has an article about the U.S. Senate committee hearing yesterday on Internet advertising and privacy that is equal parts entertaining, hopeful and terrifying.
Terrifying because of the lack of knowledge the senators have on the issue. Entertaining because of some of the senator witness exchanges. Hopeful because they seem to realize they’re not experts and are trying to learn more. We could see progress.
The Senate hearing had been called as fears grow that the massive volume of information that Internet companies are collecting about users is violating their privacy.
According to an article appearing on ZDNet.co.uk:
The UK’s information commissioner is warning that the government has not paid enough attention to the dangers of data sharing.
“The tenor of the government’s argument has focused closely on the benefits of data sharing, paying perhaps too little attention to the potential hazards associated with ambitious programmes of data sharing,” stated the report. “The government has consistently laid itself open to the criticism that it considers ‘data sharing’ in itself an unconditional good, and that it will go to considerable lengths to encourage data-sharing programmes, while paying insufficient heed to the corresponding risks or to people’s legitimate concerns.”
According to CBC.ca, Ontario’s information and privacy commissioner, Ann Cavoukian, is calling on Google to fight a court order to give media company Viacom the records of every video that users have watched on YouTube.
Ann Cavoukian said the ruling was “particulary disturbing from a privacy perspective” in a letter she sent Tuesday to Sergey Brin, Google’s president of technology and one of the company’s founders. The commissioner made her statement public on Thursday.
Our development lead Dean and his wife Rachel welcomed their new daughter Lauren into the world at 5:10 a.m this morning. This is number three for Dean and Rachel and their third girl. Mother and baby are doing well. Congratulations!
We’ll create a TrustMe account for Lauren to make sure she gets started on the right foot.
Mike and Derek’s latest podcast is available at devcasting.com. Click here for a direct link.
