Azaroth

Obviously, as everyone knows by now (or should) — Viacomm has successfully sued Google, or more accurately, YouTube which is owned by Google.

What has actually been ruled, and again I really hope you already know this, is that Google is being forced to turn over all records of what your ass has watched on YouTube.
Yes, you. Everything you’ve ever watched. Like, ever.

Now, frankly, I don’t even know what the fuck I’ve watched on YouTube. It’s embedded in so many sites at this point that, over the years, absolutely nothing would surprise me. Jeff Freeman has a large collection of marauding penis cartoons on the front page of his blog, brought to life by the magic of YouTube. I posted a video of a woman talking a whole lot of shit about the American government and their tendencies toward really, really enjoying disaster capitalism.
Is someone going to black bag me for one of those two things? What about one of the other 5,000 videos I’ve watched on YouTube?

Answer: If they’re going to, ultimately it doesn’t have shit to do with this ruling.

People are getting all fucked up over this, and I get it. But the ONLY thing that this particular ruling has caused is the very small potential for you to be sued for watching something Viacomm owns. Quick list being MTV, BET, Nickelodian, Comedy Central, Paramount, and, well.. yeah, we can all pretty much get sued. But we won’t, because that’d be about 27,000,000 individual lawsuits. If Viacomm filed millions of lawsuits all around the globe, they’d start getting thrown out of court pretty quick, and Viacomm would go bankrupt both from the 5,000 man team of lawyers they’d need to elist 365 days a year, and the horrible publicity.

You can’t just sue EVERYONE, or else I’d copyright the little red guy smoking a cigar that I use as a messageboard avatar and sue every person who came across it - because viewing is downloading and downloading is creating a copy, sucker. Etc. Clicked on a page that had my avatar, even though you had no idea it was there, and you weren’t looking for it specifically? Too bad. Lawsuit.

Now, there is the possibility that a small percentage of people might see a lawsuit against them. Twelve year old girls and grandmothers and things like that - RIAA style. And I shouldn’t take that so lightly - it’s super fucked. But mass distress probably isn’t necessary. Not for THIS reason, anyway.

The main point, and my real question to you, is this:

Why the hell do you assume your data is safe with Google in the first place?

The reason this is happening is because Google is a massive information collection agency. Every time you hit any one of their many, many sites or services - they log and keep every bit of data about you that they can collect. This lawsuit wouldn’t be a problem if this weren’t a case. Google itself is what is incredibly, incredibly dangerous here. Not some lawsuit from Viacomm that just happens to be the first in a line of many incidents that reveals some of this data to outside sources.
Do you honestly think that had you searched something on Google or sent an email with Gmail (or whatever) that the Super Ultra Fascist Party of 2018 wants to see, you’ll be safe from that information ever leaving Google’s servers?

Did you honestly think that no lawsuits of this nature would ever come up, and no companies would ever obtain your information?

Christ, do you honestly think that Intelligence doesn’t have general access to Google TODAY? If you had to put money on whether they did or didn’t, what would you choose?

Come on, folks. Stop freaking out. Because your information was NEVER safe. So don’t act like this is some kind of shocking, world changing incident. Nothing has changed.

Everything on the internet collects information about you, and most of that information is stored for a very, very long time — if not forever. Google is just one of the many main culprits and worst offenders. If you’re concerned about the REAL problem here, ask Google why the fuck they collect pubic hair samples from your dog and why they keep all of that information on you indefinitely.

Honestly, for what reason?

To better serve you?

Welcome to 1983, noob.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 11th, 2008 at 1:45 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.