What have you been watching on YouTube lately?

News items like this sort of kick in my worst paranoia fears.

Since the ruling ignores the VPPA, one would assume Google’s well-payed lawyers would file an appeal?

Ragtime: So long as they weren’t Huey, Dewey and Louie, I think you are in the clear.

I think that I am likely to be busted for about a thousand viewing of Mahnamahna.

What have you been watching on YouTube lately?

This

Boy, your right about that, jim. I’ve always been amazed at the psychological processes involved wherein people go Able Sugar over the gathering of information by government bureaucrats who are at least theoretically responsible to the public via elected officials(even if many layers removed) while not batting an eye over usually much more intrusive actions by private organizations officially responsible to no one (except at great expense via lawsuit).

Agreed with #10. Many librarians in the US, for example, quite sensibly decided that the best way to prevent the FBI snooping through their patrons’ records was to stop keeping them. In fact, behind the central circulation desk at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s main library is a rather prominent bin for the call slips attached to patron requests to be collected and shredded.

If firms like Google gave a shit about privacy, they’d do the same. But, let’s be fair, firms like Google can say in their defense that their customers effectively demand it: we want to keep track of what we’ve viewed, bought, sent, and so forth forever; we want our credit card numbers stored for quick purchases; we want integrated online calendars, email, web bookmarks, picture and video sharing, shopping, and all the rest. Or at least that’s what we tell them when they ask. There is a lot of information out there about us that we never gave anyone permission to collect, but there’s also a lot out there we gave up ourselves quite voluntarily.

So it seems like there is a more fundamental question we have to ask ourselves: why do we citizens and consumers prize convenience so much that we are willing to give up so many other values in exchange for it?

why do we citizens and consumers prize convenience so much that we are willing to give up so many other values in exchange for it?

Yes, this is an important question, but I’d say at least some of it has to do with both online skill and more general knowledge about how these things work. Some of it is Internet-specific (what’s an IP address, how can it be used to trace anyone?), and some of it is ignorance at a different level.

I’m always fascinated by how willingly people give out their phone number at the cash register even though you know they hate getting marketing phone calls. People don’t make the connection.

I agree ignorance is a problem, Eszter, but even less-savvy folks have heard by now dozens of stories about identity theft, hackers stealing records from online retailers, and so on. Indeed, being less well informed is likely if anything to magnify those threats. And many technothrillers that Hollywood has put out over the past 25+ years have made the availability of and access to sensitive digitized data about people a plot point, if not the central theme of the movie. (Wargames is the first I remember seeing.) They succeed at the box office in large part because they play on existing fears in their audiences.

So I’m not convinced that the people telling the person behind cash registers their phone numbers are all that ignorant in ways relevant to this question. Of IP addresses, sure. But not knowing about people gathering data on the sly in what seems to most folks obscure and hypertechnical ways is one thing; why do we keep helping these firms sort and label all the data they collect?

From watching people in line at cash registers, I’m pretty sure a lot of people give their numbers because they’re intimidated about saying “no”. Whether they think it is required for a purchase, and saying “no” would be like being told your card was canceled, or whether they’re just too polite to refuse, it’s just high-pressure sales.

My first reaction to today’s decision was not that Viacom would try to collect royalties, but that they wanted the information for their own marketing databases. Although a really evil person would combine them: instead of demanding royalties, just punish the people with a sea of junk mail. Or credit checks at the right interval to lower a credit rating.

I know of at least one British telecoms company that adopted the librarian’s approach; they altered the source code of a proxy they were using so it no longer logged anything. MI5 want the logs? What logs?

Individual users of an ISP can access YouTube, but from Google’s perspective, it appears they’re using the same gateway address

Not the ISP you use at home, that ISP gives you a real WAN IP; your ISP has records linking customers to the IPs they leased at any given time and he will identify you with a court order (or, I suppose, without it as well these days).

At work you probably do have a single WAN IP for the whole office, sure. But your IT guys have logs and they can use them to identify you.

Also, if you logged into your gmail account in one browser tab while accessing youtube in another tab – it wouldn’t surprise me if your gmail account id gets passed to youtube and saved in some database there. Seems like a natural thing to do.

I’m quite sure that browsers make this nearly impossible.

No, it’s quite common. In fact, every single site you visit that shows Google’s ads (and they seem to be nearly everywhere) will log your visits in Google’s databases.

No, it’s quite common. In fact, every single site you visit that shows Google’s ads (and they seem to be nearly everywhere) will log your visits in Google’s databases.

What does this have to do with passing your Gmail id to YouTube’s databases?

Just as a test, I went over to talkingpointsmemo.com and clicked on an in-page YouTube video. Several new connections were made when I clicked on that video, including some to “video-stats.video.google.com” — which would have sent all my “google.com” cookies including my Gmail ID. Did they log that cookie when they received it? I have no idea. But they could have.

Similarly, Google recorded through Google Analytics that I visited this site. Now in this case the “google.com” domain wasn’t used and so my Gmail ID wasn’t sent. Of course, my visit here could then be connected to my visit to other sites (like TPM) via the anonymous identifier given me the first time I encountered the “google-analytics.com” domain (assuming i didn’t purge that cookie). And perhaps at some point that identifier could be linked to a less-anonymous one through a visit to a site that has access to it.

We’re putting a lot of trust in Google, whether we know it or not, not to make a near-comprehensive dossier of our Internet activities.

Idlemind, how do you know that google.com domain wasn’t used? It could’ve been used from some invisible frame or via javascript/applet or some other way.

Have you noticed how sometimes you visit a site where you’ve never been before, there is an amazon ad on the page and this amazon ad knows who you are and addresses you by name?

jake: In case other commenters have not made it clear – all traffic going through your DSL/cable has the same IP number (unless you have a multi-IP “business tier” service which most people don’t). When you are “logged in” to Google, Yahoo, or anything else, that ties your Google/Yahoo/XYZ ID to your IP number, at that time or period. When you access anything else “anonymously”, that exposes your IP number, and Google/Yahoo can correlate e.g. any Doubleclick or other “tracker” hits from that IP number to you.

There is still the possibility that they cannot distinguish between you and your family member/roommate who is on the same “line”. But how much of a difference does that make? If e.g. your spouse/kid/parent is “logged in” to Google, you can surf “anonymously” as much as you like, it can be correlated to their ID.

Jake, yes and no. What the court ordered does not seem like it would include any unique identifiers for gmail users. But the gmail cookie, which is the unique identifier for user and session, is accessible from youtube, even embedded youtube, because, as idlemind points out, youtube videos make connections to the google domain, and gmail aliases to mail.google. Your cookie is actually in the google, not a specific gmail, domain. If by “gmail ID” you mean the gmail username, I doubt google stores that in the clear in cookies, but the cookie can identify you to the google servers, including when you watch youtube. In short, no the judgement doesn’t turn this info over, but yes, google can and (I would bet money) is tracking it.

Amplification of my previous post: Ordinarily, in the federal courts, disputes about discovery are delegated to a magistrate — a sort of assistant judge. The magistrate’s ruling can be appealed to the district judge pursuant to Rule 72 of the civil procedure rules (though they don’t call it an appeal).

This order, however, is signed by the district judge. I don’t know whether the practice is different in the Southern District, or whether this case is receiving special treatment.