The risk isn’t Google, it’s lawyers

Posted by Matthew on July 3, 2008 at 8:19 pm

There’s been endless and increasing debate over the last several years about just how safe Google’s proverbial vaults are. The world’s largest Internet company has been stockpiling mountains of data for years — on our search habits, email usage, ad-viewing statistics, etc — and countless Google Labs projects aim to expand its scope even further. There’s even one that is intended to archive your complete personal medical history.

Naturally, this has many people concerned about the security of their data. Privacy advocates in particular are very wary of the sheer volume of information that Google collects and stores on each user. That being said, the general consensus (and please note I said “general” — there are of course dissenting opinions) is that in today’s world your life is online (in some form) whether you want it to be or not, and Google is a pretty friendly company that tends to do its damndest to protect its users. In other words, it’s widely believed that in general Google adheres to their “do no evil” policy, and consequently enjoys a rare level of likability for a company of its size.

But however careful and diligent Google is about protecting all that data from theft, abuse, exposure, and misuse, they can’t avoid overreaching judges and politicians who engage in practices of questionable constitutional merit in the interest of “protecting” someone from something — though they never seem to be protecting you and me, but more typically large corporations and/or “national security” (which has, in my opinion, become one of the most disgusting phrases of the decade for how often it is used to toss the Constitution and Bill of Rights out the window).

Today, a federal judge ordered Google to turn over trillions of Youtube access logs to media giant Viacom (which owns Comedy Central, CBS, Nickelodeon, and dozens of other properties). The logs show which videos are viewed most on Youtube by which users, which Viacom is particularly interested in as part of their $1 billion lawsuit against Google alleging that the search giant built a business by willfully infringing on copyrighted works. Although it appears that Google is asking to be allowed anonymize the logs before handing them over, I think the real danger here has become clear. The problem isn’t that Google might do something misguided with all this data; the danger is simply that they have the data, which gives other companies the opportunity to acquire it through (shadily) legal action. Even if you trust Google, you can’t trust the government very much these days.

The lawsuit is crap, of course, and the reality is that the execs of these huge media corporations are too outpaced by today’s technology trends to adapt to the market, and they think they can still control every last frame of video they produce. What they simply don’t get is that once they put it out there for consumption, the game’s over. They need to stop trying to control people’s lives and refocus on the quality of content and how they deliver it. Their current strategy, rather than improve their own offerings, is just to continually sue everyone they see, but that doesn’t solve the problem. If these companies put half of the energy into building new business models that they do into litigating, they would solve their own problem overnight. But I could go on about that for hours…that’s another post entirely. It’s amazing how people who get paid millions of dollars a year can be so short-sighted.

CNN: Youtube ordered to reveal its viewers