Google to Mask Data Before Handover, YouTubers Now Safe From Viacom

In the ongoing legal kerfuffle between Viacom and Google, it was beginning to look like Youtube users were going to take the fall for the Goog. Privacy advocates cried foul when a judge ruled that Google had to turn over the IP addresses and user IDs of the viewers for every YouTube video to Viacom, but in a document filed yesterday both companies agreed to mask the user data, assigning arbitrary identifiers to users in lieu of actual info. The masking system will likely be similar to AOL’s hilarious botched search dataset experiment two years ago, but I’d say a public release of this data is unlikely. [Ars]