Almost a year ago I wrote about Privacy International's damning indictment of Google for our print edition (see PC World, August 2007). They ranked the search giant bottom of the list, giving them a "Comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy" rating. It now looks like Google's anti-privacy chickens are coming home to roost ...

A US court has ruled that anyone who has ever watched a video on YouTube will have their details handed to a a third-party. Those details include log-in IDs, computer IP addresses and details of what video clips were watched -- a massive 12 terabytes of data.

Media conglomerate Viacom, owners of MTV and Paramount Pictures, claim YouTube is guilty of copyright infringement and sought the viewer logs to help make its case. They also get details of all videos that have been removed from the site for whatever reason.

Google says it hopes it'll be allowed to anonymize the data before the handover. (Yeah, and we've all seen how well that works!) And yet again they've failed to justify why they need to record so much user information -- down to the level of what amounts to your internet street address -- for simply watching a video clip.