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Internet giant Google 'ordered' to hand over personal details of millions of YouTube users to Viacom

• American and British governments want to know details of every YouTube video ever watched in latest profiling scandal

Internet Goliath Google has been ordered to hand over the personal details of anyone who has ever watched a YouTube video in the lastest invasion of privacy scandal to rock the world's internet users.

The invasive ruling - which has monumental privacy implications for many millions of internet users - was made as part of the search engine's legal battle with content provider Viacom over 'allegations' of copyright infringement.

Under the new ruling, Google, which bought YouTube for $1.65 billion (£820 million) in 2006, must hand over to Viacom its viewing log - which includes users' log-in information and their IP address, the code that identifies their host computer. Campanies and government agencies can then build up a detailed profile of from the user's IP address be scanning and attacking points of presence POPs.

Although the case is being contested in the United States, legal experts have warned that the ruling would almost certainly apply to all YouTube users worldwide, including those in the UK. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an internet freedom campaign group, described the judgment as a 'setback' to online privacy rights.

Viacom, which owns MTV and Paramount Pictures, has alleged that YouTube has done 'little or nothing' to stem the flow of copyrighted material on its site. The company said it had identified more than 150,000 unauthorised clips of its content that had been uploaded.

In one case, the Al Gore documentary An Inconvenient Truth had been viewed 1.5 billion times. But Google claims its safeguards already exceed its legal obligations in helping content owners protect their works and says Viacom's lawsuit is a threat to internet freedom!

The search engine said it abides by the rules of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which states that as long as sites such as YouTube remove copyright content as soon as it is brought to their attention, they are protected by law from prosecution. A spokesman for Viacom tried to play down fears that individual YouTube users would be prosecuted. 'Only our legal team has access to the data,' he said. 'We are not going to use it to go after individual users.'

However, the U.S. district court in New York declined Viacom's request that Google be forced to hand over the source code of YouTube - details of how the site works - saying it is a trade secret.

Catherine Lacavera, Google's senior litigation counsel, said: 'We will ask Viacom to respect users' privacy and allow us to anonymise the logs before producing them under the court's order.'

Simon Davies, a British privacy expert, 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.'

This latest abuse of privacy action comes on the surf of a tidal wave of policing actions against internet users by corporations and government agencies desperate to destroy our online privacy to ensure they know everything about us.



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