Dan Herbert's

There is a classic episode of The Simpsons where Renier Wolfcastle is shooting a movie scene in a nuclear power plant and is given a pair of saftey goggles to protect his eyes from a tub of acid that is going to be spilt during the scene. During the scene, things go horribly wrong and Renier is swept away while saying “My eyes, the goggles do nothing!”
 

Google just released their own “goggles” feature in gmail labs, meant to ensure you do not send out a potentially regretful email late at night. The feature works by asking you to solve a set of arithmetic problems before you are allowed to send out your email.

The idea of being required to solve long arithmetic problems before being allowed to send emails is an awesome idea in my opinion. I recommend bumping the difficulty to level 5 if you want to try it. I set the difficulty to 5 to begin with, and given the simplicity of the equations at that level, I’d hate to see how easy the lower levels are.

I think I’ll have a lot of fun with this one!

As you probably have already heard, a judge has ordered YouTube to fork over all of their viewer logs to Viacom. This means the record every video you’ve ever watch will be handed to Viacom. Potentially millions of dollars in marketing data is to be handed over to a company who makes its money through clever marketing. This data has personally identifiable information and could probably be used to make the money Viacom is suing YouTube for, in addition to the lawsuit.

The idea that everything I or anyone else I know has ever watched on YouTube is going to become property of Viacom is very disturbing to me. Working in the IT industry, I understand that everything I do online is being logged somewhere. This is pretty much a given. When you visit a website, that site is going to log your visit. All website owners have every right to log what people do on their site, YouTube/Google being no exception. This is why many sites have a privacy policy to communicate with visitors, what they should expect the website owner to track about their visits and how it is to be used. Google, like most companies, is very open to the fact that they will store records basically indefinitely, however they are for their own internal use. Their privacy policy is very outspoken about what rights they allow you to have.

Google has a good track record of showing that they respect the privacy of its users and it is the main reason I prefer to use their products over their competition. They have actively shown that they respect their users’ privacy by not giving information away or using it for marketing, keeping data secure, fighting the government when they demand data, and following through on their promises. I’m glad Google is at the very least trying to allow for the data to be anonymized, however I don’t think it’s right to be put in that situation in the first place!

sxephil, an popular YouTube user has an excellent video which has been shown on MSNBC, CNN, and even in the NY Times apparently. You can watch the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGfAu_HRz6g

Another YouTube user has come up with a (somewhat inevitable given the scale of this incident) plan to respond to Viacom’s actions in this lawsuit. I think their video sums up exactly my beef with Viacom. They talk about a boycott of Viacom. I’m not sure how well that will work out since major boycotts like this don’t seem to ever become anything, but I feel pretty strongly about privacy and I think it’s the right thing to do. Please, spend 5 minutes to watch the video and then try your best to avoid any of the companies mentioned in the video.

For simplicity’s sake, I’ve included a screenshot of the list of companies Viacom owns so that you can join the boycott. Don’t contribute any money in any way to the following companies:

I want to make it clear that this post is not made to worship Google or YouTube, it is a rant to vent my anger about another company who feels the need to invade the assumption of privacy between YouTube and its users. YouTube has every right to record and use any data they find on me, as long as it adheres to their public privacy policy. Giving my records to Viacom is not something I feel they should have the right to do.