Stan- This is a concept I've often grappled with. I've always thought of an IP as personal. What if someone doesn't work on a laptop? I happen to use my desk top 90% of the time, and I'm the only person in my house who uses a computer (crazy talk!). Does this mean that I'm more traceable? Probably. Your example of a license plate is right on. Well said.
Prometheus
· 1 year ago
I don't think Viacom needed a law suit if IPs weren't personal information..
Logical Extremes
· 1 year ago
More precisely, an IP address identifies a computer or a NAT router. In my case, there are typically a dozen computers sharing my (dynamic) external IP address, and there may at times be multiple people associated with it.
BUT (assuming no proxy is being used) an IP address at any given moment is very personal, since it directly maps to ALL internet activity over some interval. The minute we say that IP addresses are not personal, we are saying it is OK for commercial and government entities to share and aggregate our IP address and its associated activities, which would produce amazingly intimate profiles of users even if the records were "sanitized" by not including real names or other more obvious personal identifiers. Have we learned nothing from the AOL debacle?
Nick DiGiacomo
· 1 year ago
If you look into the details of RIAA lawsuits (EFF has a good compendium), you'll see that IP addresses have not proven to be "smoking guns", but are generally just another (albeit important) piece of forensic evidence.
The elephant in the room here is the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). Google is simply acting to preserve its carrier/OSP liability exemptions there under. Carriers (evil or not) will always give up the goods, so to speak, since that's the clearest way to deflect liability from themselves to their users.
Given the DCMA, it's naive to think that declaring an IP address to be personal information will protect your privacy. That's like expecting a "private property" sign to keep the jackboots out of your house in a police state.
Justin Dean
· 1 year ago
If Google is ordered by a court to provide data to the authorities then what choice do they have? They've always fought things like this up until they have no choice. So why give them a hard time about it? Fact is - if the authorities want to know something about you then they'll find out - unless you know they are after you and you are extremely careful to hide your identity.
JD
· 1 year ago
And a license plate actually does refer to an actual person. When a cop looks up the license plate it tells them the year, make, model and the owner(s) of the vehicle AND who the vehicle is registered to with the DMV. You can't get a license plate without giving them information about who you are.
Abstract: Whatever you do, request, you are identifiable.
Dan
· 1 year ago
If an IP identifies a PC then surely this is personal - it is a PC after all ("Personal Computer")??
Peter Cunningham
· 1 year ago
OK - the solution is simple. I am surprised that the Internet community has not thought of it.
All of those appalled by what Viacom is doing need to mobilise a mass boycott of all Viacom products and services. Once Viacoms profits dive through the floor they and the rest of the recording industry will realise that suing your customers is not the smartest way to run a business.
What we need is a list of all the Viacom properties that can be targeted.
These guys need to get real - very few sales have been lost due to short snippets of films on YouTube. In fact it is the best free marketing they have ever had.
Ben Strackany
· 1 year ago
Stan, thanks for blogging about this. I saw the offending article in the paper a few days ago & was disgusted that personal identification via IP addresses was so glossed over & misrepresented. As you & others have said, an IP address, timestamp, and cooperation from the ISP is all you need to nab the right person/family 90-99.9% of the time.
Sean
· 1 year ago
IP addressing will only get "more personal" as we move closer to IPV6. The concept would allow every device and/or person on the planet to have a unique address (or multiple addresses).
The reason Google wants to only provide the addresses is nothing more than tactic to make Viacom have to go through the expense and time to determine who had what IP when at the ISP level.
Remember Kids... Do No Evil! What a crock-o-bull-$#(!
For those of you who advertise on Google via AdSense, ask them to provide you a list of IP's of who click on your ads and when.... Google won't provide this. But if you do your own log reviews and tie this to what clicks they charge you for you'll see that something doesn't add up.
Mark Z
· 1 year ago
have you ever considered that this article is the exact public outcry the courts may have intended to spawn? let's think about the direct consequences to me, goog/youtube, and viacomm:
1) i won't view copyrighted materials on youtube anymore for fear of being sued. 2) for google, the above statement has the result that they have less liability to viacomm in the future. people will self-censor their viewing habits and be more hesitant to view protected materials. youtube has largely failed in taking down protected material and until there's an algorithm to detect copyrighted material, the way to censor cheaply is to instill fear in the viewers. 3) viacomm's copyrighted materials are not posted on youtube as much and they can profit more.
Peter Cunningham
· 1 year ago
I agree with Mark Z - the aim is to shock users. Even if you could fairly accurately match the user and the IP address, the logistics of tracking every You Tube user, proving they are the offender and sending out court summons to each person would be beyond even a company the size of Google or Microsoft. Getting past all the procedural hiccups that effect (particularly in Europe) the procedures eg such as "my middle name is spelled wrong or that is my brother etc which leads to the process being restarted etc. The courts systems in Europe are slow and would be clogged up for years with this.
The Record Companies actions against big users of P2P systems saw some ridiculously high fines sometimes against teenagers. But they got press headlines and a lot of people closed their Napster and Kazaa accounts.
My main issue is how companies like Viacom can seriously pretend that their sales are damaged by YouTube. A five minute excerpt from a TV show may technically breach copyright but it is the best free advertising ever. Companies spend a fortune trying to get buzz media tactics to do this.
Also as a kid in the UK we used to tape record the Top 40 on Radio 1 each week. We had one tape and we recorded over it each week. What did we do - the records we liked we saved up all our pocket money and bought them. Without doing what we did the record company would not have sold us that record and we couldn't have bought any other records as our resources were finite. Net result = free publicity for the record company and increased sales.
If media companies concentrated on providing real value to their users instead of trying to charge each person multiple times to see the same content on different platforms and in different countries then they would not be in the mess they are in.
Treating your customers like criminals is no way to run a business. Viacom will find that many of the people it wants to ruin in court for minor infringements are actually lawful consumers of much of their content and contribute large amounts to their revenue.
All Comments
This is a concept I've often grappled with. I've always thought of an IP as personal. What if someone doesn't work on a laptop? I happen to use my desk top 90% of the time, and I'm the only person in my house who uses a computer (crazy talk!). Does this mean that I'm more traceable? Probably. Your example of a license plate is right on. Well said.
BUT (assuming no proxy is being used) an IP address at any given moment is very personal, since it directly maps to ALL internet activity over some interval. The minute we say that IP addresses are not personal, we are saying it is OK for commercial and government entities to share and aggregate our IP address and its associated activities, which would produce amazingly intimate profiles of users even if the records were "sanitized" by not including real names or other more obvious personal identifiers. Have we learned nothing from the AOL debacle?
The elephant in the room here is the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). Google is simply acting to preserve its carrier/OSP liability exemptions there under. Carriers (evil or not) will always give up the goods, so to speak, since that's the clearest way to deflect liability from themselves to their users.
Given the DCMA, it's naive to think that declaring an IP address to be personal information will protect your privacy. That's like expecting a "private property" sign to keep the jackboots out of your house in a police state.
YouTube/Viacom privacy followup (and what Google should do)
http://danbri.org/words/2008/07/04/362
Abstract: Whatever you do, request, you are identifiable.
All of those appalled by what Viacom is doing need to mobilise a mass boycott of all Viacom products and services. Once Viacoms profits dive through the floor they and the rest of the recording industry will realise that suing your customers is not the smartest way to run a business.
What we need is a list of all the Viacom properties that can be targeted.
These guys need to get real - very few sales have been lost due to short snippets of films on YouTube. In fact it is the best free marketing they have ever had.
The reason Google wants to only provide the addresses is nothing more than tactic to make Viacom have to go through the expense and time to determine who had what IP when at the ISP level.
Remember Kids... Do No Evil!
What a crock-o-bull-$#(!
For those of you who advertise on Google via AdSense, ask them to provide you a list of IP's of who click on your ads and when.... Google won't provide this. But if you do your own log reviews and tie this to what clicks they charge you for you'll see that something doesn't add up.
1) i won't view copyrighted materials on youtube anymore for fear of being sued.
2) for google, the above statement has the result that they have less liability to viacomm in the future. people will self-censor their viewing habits and be more hesitant to view protected materials. youtube has largely failed in taking down protected material and until there's an algorithm to detect copyrighted material, the way to censor cheaply is to instill fear in the viewers.
3) viacomm's copyrighted materials are not posted on youtube as much and they can profit more.
The Record Companies actions against big users of P2P systems saw some ridiculously high fines sometimes against teenagers. But they got press headlines and a lot of people closed their Napster and Kazaa accounts.
My main issue is how companies like Viacom can seriously pretend that their sales are damaged by YouTube. A five minute excerpt from a TV show may technically breach copyright but it is the best free advertising ever. Companies spend a fortune trying to get buzz media tactics to do this.
Also as a kid in the UK we used to tape record the Top 40 on Radio 1 each week. We had one tape and we recorded over it each week. What did we do - the records we liked we saved up all our pocket money and bought them. Without doing what we did the record company would not have sold us that record and we couldn't have bought any other records as our resources were finite. Net result = free publicity for the record company and increased sales.
If media companies concentrated on providing real value to their users instead of trying to charge each person multiple times to see the same content on different platforms and in different countries then they would not be in the mess they are in.
Treating your customers like criminals is no way to run a business. Viacom will find that many of the people it wants to ruin in court for minor infringements are actually lawful consumers of much of their content and contribute large amounts to their revenue.