Want to clear your viewing history on YouTube? Good luck

Image courtesy flickr user benoutram

As our Technology blog reported yesterday, YouTube and Viacom have reached an agreement on the controversial user privacy issue of last week. 

In a stipulation issued by the court, the two parties agreed that all data from YouTube user logs would be anonymized -- that is, the IP addresses and user names would be removed from all viewing data and substituted with placeholder values.  Translation: Now, no Viacom employees or outside legal experts will know it was me who watched Miss USA fall down 300 times in a row last night.

But the real subtext of this controversy has taken a few days to bubble to the surface. Google may have narrowly maneuvered out of the potential PR disaster, but who's to say there won't be another company suing them for their logs next week?  In 2006, the Justice Department subpoenaed Google for two months' worth of search data.  Google fought, and won, like they did this time. But the streak has to end sometime.

Neither Google's search engine nor YouTube ever ask users to explicitly, clearly agree to having their behavior permanently logged. After all, if they did, a lot of people might say no. And though YouTube has a page called, "How do I clear my Viewing History," this is, at best, misleading. Clearing your history in this manner appears only to remove the videos that you've watched since your browser window has been open -- and not the endless perma-log YouTube stores of all the videos you've ever watched.  The help page above barely makes this  distinction.  I asked YouTube about this yesterday, and am still waiting for an answer.

Comments

[John]

Web servers such as Apache will automatically log who does what, and where, and when.

I do like privacy, but thats what proxies and such are for. However, I would like it if this information wasn't logged anyways.