Item 1: A local newspaper reporter muses on a local radio show about the future of newspapers. Yes, the economy is bad, but the long-term problem is that classified ads have gone online and they're not coming back. One option is to charge for a paper what it actually costs to produce; this would more than double the price, cutting readership and so on and so on. The days of the newspaper as everyone's window to the world are fading fast. That, too has gone online.
Item 2: Viacom is urging viewers to call their cable operators (Time-Warner cable in particular) to urge them not to drop their channels. At issue: Viacom wants to increase its charges to providers. Providers argue that ratings are decreasing and the shows are available online for free in any case (often via the exact same cable). Fundamentally, the shift is from TV -- or perhaps more precisely, dedicated TV channels -- to online, where bits is bits and video is just one more bit stream, albeit a considerably bigger one than pretty much everything else.
(Here's the top hit I got for viacom time warner, while putting together item 2. The particular article is from Dow Jones, now owned by NewsCorp, carried on CNN Money, owned by Time-Warner. Caveat lector.)
Showing posts with label Viacom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Viacom. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Privacy hot potato
It seems that Google and Viacom have reached an agreement on the YouTube usage data Google was ordered to turn over; Google will be allowed to anonymize the data by replacing user IDs and IP addresses with random tokens.
This is good news (though not as good as, say "turns out the data was anonymous to begin with"), but not a surprise. Google and Viacom had both stated that they wanted to find a way to protect the anonymity of the data. Google's interest is obvious, but Viacom had an interest as well: If they get anonymized data, no one can accuse them of abusing personalized data or accidentally leaking it. AOL already saw what it's like to be the guy that leaks personalized data, even if only by accident. No one wants to be that guy.
Now, the whole reason this is a big deal is because personalized data is valuable, and that presents a temptation. But a rational player will realize that the high cost of getting caught, together with the difficulty of keeping a dozen terabytes of valuable data completely secret and the lack of anyone else but Google to blame a breach on, far outweighs any benefit there may be. Viacom is just being rational. If there's a breach now, the list of suspects is one, not two companies long.
Put another way, the personal content of the usage data has value in general, but it has less than no net value to Viacom. It's a hot potato they don't want to catch. Better to make sure it's not thrown in the first place.
[Re-reading my original post on this topic, I see I already made this point, but I still think it's a good point.]
This is good news (though not as good as, say "turns out the data was anonymous to begin with"), but not a surprise. Google and Viacom had both stated that they wanted to find a way to protect the anonymity of the data. Google's interest is obvious, but Viacom had an interest as well: If they get anonymized data, no one can accuse them of abusing personalized data or accidentally leaking it. AOL already saw what it's like to be the guy that leaks personalized data, even if only by accident. No one wants to be that guy.
Now, the whole reason this is a big deal is because personalized data is valuable, and that presents a temptation. But a rational player will realize that the high cost of getting caught, together with the difficulty of keeping a dozen terabytes of valuable data completely secret and the lack of anyone else but Google to blame a breach on, far outweighs any benefit there may be. Viacom is just being rational. If there's a breach now, the list of suspects is one, not two companies long.
Put another way, the personal content of the usage data has value in general, but it has less than no net value to Viacom. It's a hot potato they don't want to catch. Better to make sure it's not thrown in the first place.
[Re-reading my original post on this topic, I see I already made this point, but I still think it's a good point.]
Saturday, July 5, 2008
Google, Viacom and privacy
A certain amount of controversy over privacy is just part of being Google, not just because Google is a large software company, but also because it aims to make as much of the world's information available to as many of the world's people as it can, subject, of course, to the admonition not to be evil. "Don't be evil" is just three simple words, but just how those three words apply when the bits hit the wire is the stuff of dissertations and lawsuits.
Google is embroiled in at least two significant disputes lately: The ongoing rumbles over Street View, which seem to be getting worked out piece by piece as we go along, and a lawsuit by Viacom over YouTube which, while probably not as bad as the flap over Italian tax privacy, does involve at least a couple of echoes of the AOL search data debacle.
That one certainly looks bad at first blush. In his ruling, Judge Louis L. Stanton has granted Viacom access to "all data from the Logging database concerning each time a YouTube video has been viewed on the YouTube website or through embedding on a third-party website." That data includes "for each instance a video is watched, the unique “login ID” of the user who watched it, the time when the user started to watch the video, the internet protocol address other devices connected to the internet use to identify the user’s computer (“IP address”), and the identifier for the video." [The link above is via Wired. If the original ruling is on the District Court's website yet, I can't find it. If anyone has a better link, please send it]
So there's a bit of a privacy issue there.
Google had two objections to this, first that the database was big. Well, 12 terabytes is a lot of data, but as the judge points out, it's not too big for commodity disks these days. The more serious argument is that the database contains personally identifiable data and is more than Viacom needs to “recreate the number of views for any particular day of a video” and "compare the attractiveness of allegedly infringing videos with that of non-infringing videos."
The judge was not impressed, calling Google's concerns "speculative" and citing a (very reasonable) blog post by Google developer Alma Whitten arguing that an IP address by itself is generally not personally identifiable information. That seems a bit odd since in this case the IP address is not by itself, but linked with just the kind of information that Whitten claims would make it personally identifiable.
However, the main thrust of the judge's argument seems to be that Viacom's use of the data is limited to a particular purpose in the discovery phase of a particular civil case. Presumably, if Viacom is later found to be making other use of the data, or if the data leaks out into the larger world, Google or someone else can come back after them. In the case at hand, Viacom would probably also run afoul of the Video Privacy Protection Act. Well, maybe so, but a genie out of a bottle is a genie out of a bottle ..
It's not clear to me why Google couldn't have just been compelled to disclose what Viacom said it was after: detailed logs of how many people watched what videos at what time, but not which particular people or from what IP address. In the cases Viacom is interested in, where large numbers of people watched copyrighted material, there should be more than enough individuals involved to provide anonymity.
On the bright side, Google and Viacom are now trying to work out how best to implement the court order without giving away personally identifiable information. Google's interest in this is obvious. Viacom also has an interest, though. They would like to be able to say "we only looked at the information we asked for, and we can prove it." No one wants to be seen as the company that inadvertently gave away information on millions of users. AOL went through that. It hurt.
In the background to all this is the long-standing complaint from privacy advocates that Google should have anonymized the YouTube data to begin with, as it has with its web search data. You can't divulge what you don't know, and in a case like the present one Google could have convincingly argued that it can only supply Viacom with what it asked for and no more. This is clearly easier and less error-prone than the present case.
In practice, it's probably not that simple. It's easy to think of a company as a monolith, but only the smallest companies really are. When you get to be Google's size, and the entity in question is a newly-acquired subsidiary, it's not a great surprise that rules and practices would differ.
Google is embroiled in at least two significant disputes lately: The ongoing rumbles over Street View, which seem to be getting worked out piece by piece as we go along, and a lawsuit by Viacom over YouTube which, while probably not as bad as the flap over Italian tax privacy, does involve at least a couple of echoes of the AOL search data debacle.
That one certainly looks bad at first blush. In his ruling, Judge Louis L. Stanton has granted Viacom access to "all data from the Logging database concerning each time a YouTube video has been viewed on the YouTube website or through embedding on a third-party website." That data includes "for each instance a video is watched, the unique “login ID” of the user who watched it, the time when the user started to watch the video, the internet protocol address other devices connected to the internet use to identify the user’s computer (“IP address”), and the identifier for the video." [The link above is via Wired. If the original ruling is on the District Court's website yet, I can't find it. If anyone has a better link, please send it]
So there's a bit of a privacy issue there.
Google had two objections to this, first that the database was big. Well, 12 terabytes is a lot of data, but as the judge points out, it's not too big for commodity disks these days. The more serious argument is that the database contains personally identifiable data and is more than Viacom needs to “recreate the number of views for any particular day of a video” and "compare the attractiveness of allegedly infringing videos with that of non-infringing videos."
The judge was not impressed, calling Google's concerns "speculative" and citing a (very reasonable) blog post by Google developer Alma Whitten arguing that an IP address by itself is generally not personally identifiable information. That seems a bit odd since in this case the IP address is not by itself, but linked with just the kind of information that Whitten claims would make it personally identifiable.
However, the main thrust of the judge's argument seems to be that Viacom's use of the data is limited to a particular purpose in the discovery phase of a particular civil case. Presumably, if Viacom is later found to be making other use of the data, or if the data leaks out into the larger world, Google or someone else can come back after them. In the case at hand, Viacom would probably also run afoul of the Video Privacy Protection Act. Well, maybe so, but a genie out of a bottle is a genie out of a bottle ..
It's not clear to me why Google couldn't have just been compelled to disclose what Viacom said it was after: detailed logs of how many people watched what videos at what time, but not which particular people or from what IP address. In the cases Viacom is interested in, where large numbers of people watched copyrighted material, there should be more than enough individuals involved to provide anonymity.
On the bright side, Google and Viacom are now trying to work out how best to implement the court order without giving away personally identifiable information. Google's interest in this is obvious. Viacom also has an interest, though. They would like to be able to say "we only looked at the information we asked for, and we can prove it." No one wants to be seen as the company that inadvertently gave away information on millions of users. AOL went through that. It hurt.
In the background to all this is the long-standing complaint from privacy advocates that Google should have anonymized the YouTube data to begin with, as it has with its web search data. You can't divulge what you don't know, and in a case like the present one Google could have convincingly argued that it can only supply Viacom with what it asked for and no more. This is clearly easier and less error-prone than the present case.
In practice, it's probably not that simple. It's easy to think of a company as a monolith, but only the smallest companies really are. When you get to be Google's size, and the entity in question is a newly-acquired subsidiary, it's not a great surprise that rules and practices would differ.
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