Google Has Enough Data to Pull You Out of the Crowd

If you're anything like me – nothing to be proud of, I know – you probably spend your idle moments surfing the crucible of modern life that is YouTube. In just a few short years it's gone from being a niche video website to the basic staple of online entertainment.

It's worth pointing out, then, that if you're a YouTube user you will soon have your personal information handed over by YouTube's owner, Google, to the American broadcasting company Viacom. As part of Viacom's $1bn lawsuit alleging that YouTube encourages piracy, a US judge has ordered that the millions of unique internet addresses, email accounts and viewing histories of the site's users will be made available to Viacom lawyers.

The actual numbers of people affected are a little muddy – Google doesn't like to disclose exactly how many people around the world spend their coffee breaks looking at the Numa Numa kid – but it's clear that this is one of the greatest. Privacy advocates understandably have their knickers in a twist, because Judge Louis Stanton has helped Viacom manage what even the US government failed to achieve.

Google is no stranger to privacy debates. As the internet's single most powerful force, it has access to a vast array of information about internet users: not only every search request you've made, but every website you visit from Google's search page and every advert you click on while you're there. If you use YouTube, it knows what videos you watch, and if you use Gmail, it knows every intimate detail you share with friends and family. If you use Google Maps, it probably knows your physical address, and if you use Picasa it's probably got pictures of you as well. That's just the beginning: Google is moving into mobile phones, television ads and other parts of our life with a hunger bordering on the ravenous.

In the past Google has argued that it's not a danger to your privacy. Yes, it might know all that stuff, but the crucial bit of data – your IP address (the virtual telephone number that identifies every machine connected to the internet) doesn't uniquely identify you.

After all, they say, many people share IP addresses: in offices or family homes, for example. And the prevalence of open Wi-Fi hotspots means that you might not even know who else is using your connection. That's exactly the argument that Virgin Media, which recently started sending letters to customers asking them to make sure their internet connection wasn't being used illegally, has made.

In an ironic twist, though, this was the argument that Viacom used in order to gain access to the YouTube logs: it used Google's mantra over IP addresses against the company itself. If it's not unique and personally identifiable, Viacom's lawyers said, then why can't we have it?

The internet industry might deny the usefulness of IP addresses, but the unspoken reality it's the crucial piece of the jigsaw for identifying you. Even if it doesn't single you out specifically, it's probably close enough. And when given extra context – such as the things you've searched for – it's almost certainly enough to pull you out of the crowd.

That's why this isn't just about MTV knowing that I watched some silly video clips. This is about who knows what about you – and that's what has privacy campaigners so worried.