YouTube users are breathing a bit easier today. According to the Wall St. Journal, Google and Viacom agreed to let Google anonymize user data before handing it over to Viacom as part of its ongoing copyright infringement suit.
Google said Viacom agreed to allow it to substitute actual user and visitor IDs and internet protocol addresses with other unique values to help protect user privacy. Although such methods aren’t completely foolproof, see Blogoscoped’s take on a similar AOL move, the upshot is that it will be trickier to tie individual users to specific video uploads or downloads.
One item still being debated, however, is whether the privacy protocol will extend to the video-watching records of YouTube employees, a point that’s bound to be a lot trickier to solve.
