Privacy advocates question Google's YouTube monitoring

misses an important point, according to some privacy advocates: What is Google doing collecting and retaining all that data in the first place? Viacom had asked the court for access to the information stored in the logging database as part of a US$1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit filed last year against Google and its YouTube LLC video-sharing unit. U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton last week agreed with Viacom's claim that the video-viewing data could help the media and entertainment company "compare the attractiveness" of videos that allegedly infringe on its content copyrights against the appeal of those that don't do so. Google argued that handing over the data, which also includes user log-in IDs and IP addresses, would enable Viacom to determine the video watching and uploading habits of individual YouTube... [read full story]