Google and Privacy - update

The other day on July 4, 2008 I posted about the sweeping production and disclosure order in Viacom v Google that was issued by a US Court.

Today, Ontario's Privacy Commissioner, the redoutable Ann Cavoukian, challenged Google to appeal this order.

This case will clearly focus again on why Google and YouTube and others retain personal data for so long - i.e. 18 months. And that's down from two years.

The EU is clearly concerned about search engine data retention policies.

The EU seems to be heading strongly to a six month maximum retention period based on this April report.

PS - David Fraser, a Canadian East Coast lawyer, has a thoughtful blog on this available here.

HK

Copyright and Personal Privacy, eh?

Yesterday's ruling in the American mega litigation involving Viacom v. YouTube & Google requires the handover of 12 terabytes of data containing info about viewers' login ID, IP addresses, time of viewing, etc. is a potentially devastating invasion of the privacy of millions of people, who had no expectation that this could ever happen. Here's the ruling and here's the NYTimes story.

As the privacy breach debacle by AOL in 2006 showed, it is not hard to find out a lot about particular people with far less information than appears to be at stake here. Knowing an IP address and time of access can identity a particular person in many cases.

I would hope that such a ruling would not be made in Canada. We have our PIPEDA federal privacy statute.

We have the BMG ruling, in which I was pleased to have been involved. Here's two opposing views and a neutral summary of that ruling by an editor, myself and another counsel on the other side. These set forth some of the basis of the debate in Canada, if a similar situation should arise.

HK