Chickens coming home to roost for Google/YouTube in Viacom lawsuit

Last week a US court ruled that “Google must divulge the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched any video on YouTube”.

Google must divulge YouTube log
Remember those IP addresses which Google was arguing should not be considered personally identifiable information earlier this year?

Leading privacy expert Simon Davies told BBC News that the privacy of millions of YouTube users was threatened.

He said: “The chickens have come home to roost for Google.

“Their arrogance and refusal to listen to friendly advice has resulted in the privacy of tens of millions being placed under threat.”

Mr Davies said privacy campaigners had warned Google for years that IP addresses were personally identifiable information.

Google pledged last year to anonymise IP addresses for search information but it has said nothing about YouTube data.

Mr Davies said: “Governments and organisations are realising that companies like Google have a warehouse full of data. And while that data is stored it is under threat of being used and putting privacy in danger.”

The EFF said: “The Court’s erroneous ruling is a set-back to privacy rights, and will allow Viacom to see what you are watching on YouTube.

Proskauer Rose attorney Louis Solomon said the parties are now debating how to share the YouTube data with individual IP addresses masked, but while still ensuring that different users can be distinguished.

source Why worry about masking them if they aren’t “personally identifiable information”?

Don’t give Google a free pass on data collection, privacy advocates say after YouTube ruling

“Google has a business practice of retaining all the search queries of YouTube viewers,” Rotenberg said. “It is this practice that puts consumer data at risk.”

The end result, he added, “is exactly what were warning about” during a court dispute between Google and the U.S. Department of Justice over Internet search data two years ago.

In that case, the DOJ subpoenaed Google to turn over records on millions of search queries that the government said it needed as part of an effort to defend the Child Online Protection Act from legal challenges. EPIC supported Google’s ultimately successful effort to oppose the subpoena, Rotenberg said. But, he added, the privacy group cautioned even then that as part of the discovery proceedings in criminal or civil cases, Google could at any time be asked to turn over users’ personal data.

Google’s continuing habit of storing highly detailed search data so the information can be analyzed for targeted marketing purposes poses a “real concern” for U.S. residents, Rotenberg said. As the decision in the Viacom case demonstrates, “companies can’t always control who has access to this sort of data,” he noted.

Furthermore, Google’s argument that the IP addresses stored in the YouTube logging database represent personally identifiable information is at odds with the company’s previously stated views on that issue, according to Rotenberg. In cases such as its dispute with the DOJ, Google argued that IP addresses and the other search-related data was practically useless in helping anyone to identify an individual, Rotenberg said. Stanton made the same point in his July 2 ruling in favor of Viacom.

“There is a clear contradiction in Google’s position, that they will assert privacy interests when it is in their favor to do so,” Rotenberg said.

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

I just finished reading Cory Doctorow’s excellent young adult novel, Little Brother, a book I mentioned a week or two ago. Neil Gaiman put it very well when he wrote about Little Brother

I’d recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I’ve read this year, and I’d want to get it into the hands of as many smart 13 year olds, male and female, as I can. Because I think it’ll change lives. Because some kids, maybe just a few, won’t be the same after they’ve read it. Maybe they’ll change politically, maybe technologically. Maybe it’ll just be the first book they loved or that spoke to their inner geek. Maybe they’ll want to argue about it and disagree with it. Maybe they’ll want to open their computer and see what’s in there. I don’t know. It made me want to be 13 again right now and reading it for the first time, and then go out and make the world better or stranger or odder. It’s a wonderful, important book, in a way that renders its flaws pretty much meaningless.

I don’t do book reviews, but I’ll paste here a few snips from the book which as I read them seemed worth a cut and paste to a blog entry. Oh, and I just have mention in passing that I enjoyed the way Cory tossed “caltrops” and the Scoville scale into the story. Also, food for thought for me was the idea that arfids (RFID chips) in library books might be used to track people around… being over 25, a lot of the tech stuff I’ll probably have to remain pretty clueless about. But, I do recommend that you consider donating a copy for a teacher or librarian. No doubt some arfids will get nuked, so the list may continually need replacements copies, but that’s a small price to pay for an important message.

I still take my freedom for granted and let other
people take it away from me. You’re the first generation to grow
up in Gulag America, and you know what your freedom is worth
to the last goddamned cent!

Most notable has been the global attention the movement has received. Stills from the Geist video have appeared on the front
pages of newspapers in Korea, Great Britain, Germany, Egypt and
Japan, and broadcasters around the world have aired the clip on
primetime news. The issue came to a head last night, when the
British Broadcasting Corporation’s National News Evening
program ran a special report on the fact that no American
broadcaster or news agency has covered this story.

The quote above didn’t remind me of Sibel Edmonds. No, no, not at all…

Not really Cory’s words, but ones we could all use to see more frequently:

Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

if it’s the DHS’s job to keep us safe, they’re failing. All the crap they’ve done, none of it would stop the bridge from being blown up again. Tracing us around the city? Taking away our freedom? Making us suspicious of each other, turning us against each other? Calling dissenters traitors? The point of terrorism is to terrify us. The DHS terrifies me.

Right now, America is on the verge of going into anaphylactic shock over its own freedoms, and we need to inoculate ourselves against this. Technology is no cure for this paranoia; in fact, it may enhance the paranoia: it turns us into prisoners of our own device.

(from the Afterword by Andrew “bunnie” Huang, Xbox Hacker )

Boston.com- Interactive advertising: A good thing?

All one needs to do now is combine this with a little biometric analysis (retinal scanning perhaps?), as in the article about the Shell pay for gas with your fingerprints while you watch advertisements at the pump (the article, which I mentioned awhile back indicates a trend towards that type of thing) or perhaps a little celldar (Jabberwocky, anyone?), toss in the 336 billion bits of internet information (per month) which the top five harvest and I have a feeling you’ll be seeing some HIGHLY interactive advertisements pretty soon. Interactive advertising: A good thing?

Welcome to the spooky new world of gesture recognition. The field pioneered by scientists for tracking the elderly and potential terrorists is also churning out interactive displays for trade shows and hotel lobbies. Soon, a large advertising display will detect your round-shouldered frame several yards away, and offer you a coupon for a caffeinated pick-me-up. (That, or the display will see that you are about to take a swing at it, and call the cops.)

Samsung displays, which you can interact with up to 15 feet away, will turn up in hotels in major US cities later this year.

The immersive advertising setups, created by Samsung and Reactrix, become more intensely interactive as consumers draw closer. I’ll be running the other way.

ETA- if you need more, The Kassandra Project writes about 3 new articles which deal with privacy/surveillance issues which have come out in the last couple of days. Also, read up on Credit Card 2.0 (“Tap N Go” and/or “PayPass”)- RFID chipped credit cards.

NY Times- To Aim Ads, Web Is Keeping Closer Eye on You

To Aim Ads, Web Is Keeping Closer Eye on You
This is a great NYTimes article with some really good graph charts and stats; check it out. (I’ve archived the charts here and here and the article itself here (pg. 1) and here (pg.2) against it going 404)

Yahoo came out with the most data collection points in a month on its own sites — about 110 billion collections, or 811 for the average user. In addition, Yahoo has about 1,700 other opportunities to collect data about the average person on partner sites like eBay, where Yahoo sells the ads.

MySpace, which is owned by the News Corporation, and AOL, a unit of Time Warner, were not far behind.

and

These actions represented “data transmission events” — times when consumer data was zapped back to the Web companies’ servers. Five large Web operations — Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, AOL and MySpace — record at least 336 billion transmission events in a month, not counting their ad networks.

(note- AOL/Time Warner & MySpace (News Corp.) are, along with MSoft, Goog. and Yah. make up 5 of the “Big 8″ media corps.)

See also the related article How Do They Track You? Let Us Count the Ways archive archived chart

Wall Street Journal- NSA’s Domestic Spying Grows As Agency Sweeps Up Data

An exerpt from NSA’s Domestic Spying Grows
As Agency Sweeps Up Data

The NSA

now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records. The NSA receives this so-called “transactional” data from other agencies or private companies, and its sophisticated software programs analyze the various transactions for suspicious patterns. Then they spit out leads to be explored by counterterrorism programs across the U.S. government, such as the NSA’s own Terrorist Surveillance Program, formed to intercept phone calls and emails between the U.S. and overseas without a judge’s approval when a link to al Qaeda is suspected.

The NSA’s enterprise involves a cluster of powerful intelligence-gathering programs, all of which sparked civil-liberties complaints when they came to light. They include a Federal Bureau of Investigation program to track telecommunications data once known as Carnivore, now called the Digital Collection System, and a U.S. arrangement with the world’s main international banking clearinghouse to track money movements.

The effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called “black programs” whose existence is undisclosed, the current and former officials say. Many of the programs in various agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach. Among them, current and former intelligence officials say, is a longstanding Treasury Department program to collect individual financial data including wire transfers and credit-card transactions.

read the full article

I vaguely wonder if the NSA might have played a role in the Eliot Spitzer “hidden financial transactions” story. Not that I doubt there are other organizations and agencies which can monitor financial transactions like that… also, I wonder how deep the iceberg is in a case like this one. After all, we do read allegations of “hooking points” lists for “potential moles from Pentagon-related institutions” on occassion (at least in the foreign press). So, one might guess that someone in a prominent position such as Governor or Congressman might also find their name on a “hooking points list”. Purely speculation on my part, of course…

H/T to Thought Police