Clunky Flow

For quite some time Google has been feeding us the nonsense line that your IP address is not personally identifying. The absurdity of this stance is almost blinding but the reality has been brought into sharp focus by the to-ing and fro-ing in the ongoing Google-Viacom case.

Here’s how the excellent Kaila @VortexDNA characterises it:

Google: “You don’t need to have any privacy concerns about the IP addresses that we store — they aren’t personally identifying.�

Viacom: “Okay, then, give us your user logs.�

Google: “No! That’s a violation of privacy!�

Judge: “But you just said…�

The judge understandably confused has elected to assign more credibility to the claim that Google has been making before getting sued. The only problem is, they were actually telling the big lie BEFORE being sued!

Now you would think that the upshot of this would be that Google’s weasel words would now be biting them in the ass. I’m sure that’s what the judge expected to be the outcome. But no that’s not the case…the fallout from this lands squarely at your feet. How did that happen? For that I’ll pass you over to Mashable:

From Mashable on recent developments in the Google-Viacom lawsuit

When you first read about the Google-Viacom lawsuit, you never thought that it would affect you directly, did you? Think again.

Unless you’ve been extra careful to only watch non-copyrighted videos on YouTube (yeah, right), Viacom could sue you. No, it’s even worse: they could actually win

However, and interestingly enough, the court denied Viacom’s request of YouTube’s source code, which means that the big company - Google - got protected, but the little guy - us - got screwed.

How about that? They say sh1t rolls down hill.

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