Everyone has something to hide
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- So a New York judge last week ordered Google to hand over 12 terabytes of YouTube user information to Viacom.
Yes, we know what you watched last summer, or at least Viacom’s attorneys soon will.
The owners of Comedy Central and VH1 are attempting to prove that more people watch pirated clips of John Stewart and Behind The Music than, say, the Wii Fit Girl or that goofy guy dancing his way around the globe (video). In the aggregate, maybe more people are watching clips of The Daily Show on them Internets.
But a viral video will still draw more eyeballs than any single thing the mainstream media can belch out, regardless of how clever Stewart is. Partly that’s because most people who’d want to see it already have, for free, over the airwaves. (Which makes YouTube’s harm to Viacom exactly bupkis.)
Trouble is, our video viewing habits are supposed to be protected by federal law. After a reporter went dumpster diving on Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork in 1987 and came up with Blockbuster rental receipts (he was looking for porn, but mostly he found Hitchcock and Fellini) Congress passed a law explicitly protecting the privacy of movie rentals.
The judge in the Viacom case, Louis Stanton, decided that watching a YouTube video somehow qualified as less worthy of protection than Bork’s VCR. (I’d like to see what’s in Stanton’s NetFlix queue —- or maybe he’s a SugarDVD fan.)
The usual answer from people who claim to be perfectly happy having attorneys rooting around their private lives like squirrels in a nuthouse is that they’ve “got nothing to hide.” To which I usually say, “terrific, now drop your pants.”
Everybody’s got something to hide, even if it probably isn’t what they watched on YouTube. Even the Transparent Society geeks who believe the path to total freedom lies in having everything exposed in plain view still wear clothes and keep their Social Security cards in their pockets.
The right to keep one’s thoughts and interests private —- and by extension, things that indicate thoughts and interests, like books and movies —- is one of the keys to democracy. Nobody can demand to know what’s going on between my ears (and trust me, you don’t want to know).
That’s the way I like it.
The real problem here is the obsession with data collection that infects Google, Microsoft, and other major service providers. If there’s a reason to keep a running record of every YouTube video I’ve watched or Web search I’ve run over the last 18 months, I can’t see it —- and Google has done a p*** poor job of explaining why they need it.
Because if a record is out there, you’re almost guaranteed that some day a lawyer with a subpoena (or a spook with an electronic back door) may come looking for it.
And there will be nothing you can do about it.
[This post originally appeared on Infoworld's Notes From the Field blog.]
Dan Tynan – Tynan on Technology (beta)
[Tynan slugs his personal blog 'Tech talk without the usual BS.' He's been writing and editing stories about technology and its discontents for more than 20 years. During that time he's been an editor in chief and an executive editor for national magazines, written for more than 50 publications, and taken home a closet full of awards. He's also the author of Computer Privacy Annoyances, soon to be a major motion picture starring Ashton Kutcher.]
.
.Stumble It!
New York Times – New worm transcodes MP3s to try to infect PCs, July 18, 2008
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It’s really easy!Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details. Download here.
July 21st, 2008 at 9:14 am
Now drop your pants!
July 21st, 2008 at 9:45 am
now this is the exact reason why I never got a youtube account or a google account.
I knew all this data collection shit would come back and haunt everyone.
I think google needs to wake up and stop collecting info. Just destroy it.
July 21st, 2008 at 10:11 pm
I’ve always wondered why the necessity of collecting user info without consent. Anyway I have nothing to hide. I understand that there’s nothing hidden or secret which won’t be revealed in time. Besides all internet activity being monitored and recorded, the govt also spies on all their citizens, and has done so long before it was all legalized. As well as this we are all accountable to the highest Court, whose representatives know every detail of our lives without the use of technology.
July 22nd, 2008 at 4:58 am
Funny how ppl are so quick to jump on Google for their tracking, but ppl w/ a Safeway card, has no problem w/ Safeway tracking their spending habits (which are sold as statistics to wholesale grocery buyers, as a chart-like item to see what is “hot” and what is “not hot”), many ppl LOVE Amazon’s “you’ve read this and we think you’d like…”, Netflix, you watched this, now look at what others in your zip-code/town/area are watching…
If ppl didn’t think that Google was tracking this information for the ability to sell it to marketers, then many of you need to wake-up, your movements on the web are tracked, packaged and sold to anyone that wants it…
Maybe it’s time to start thinking again and trying to come up w/ ways to stop this tracking other than… I’ve got nothing to hide, why are you so defensive argument…