A New York federal judge has ordered Google to turn YouTube user data over to Viacom’s outside counsel so Viacom, which is suing YouTube for upwards of a billion dollars in damages, can prove YouTube users are watching copyrighted videos.

That’s every YouTube username, associated IP address and video watched.

Well, that’s got privacy hackles up even though the judge has forbidden Viacom to use the data for any purpose other than discovery and statistical analysis.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which says the decision “threatens to expose deeply private information about what videos are watched by YouTube users,” thinks it’s illegal.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) sees it as an indictment of Google’s data-collecting ways and its behavioral-targeting schemes.

The judge, who described Google’s invasion of privacy argument as “speculative” and repeated what Google said about IP addresses not being personally revealing, refused Viacom’s petition for the source code, the code for identifying repeat copyright offenders and visits to so-called private videos too saying that could cause Google “catastrophic competitive harm.”

Viacom wanted the widgetry to prove YouTube lacks copyright filters but Google said it was a trade secret.

The order does include copies of all the videos YouTube has even taken down, its video popularity logs and its database schema, i.e., what data YouTube stores.

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