Notes on the Viacom ruling

Notes on the Viacom ruling

Posted Jul 5, 2008 7:29 UTC (Sat) by Wummel (subscriber, #7591)
In reply to: Notes on the Viacom ruling by rfunk
Parent article: Notes on the Viacom ruling

It seems Google stores more privacy data than they really need to detect user behaviour.

If you have logged in users with unique login names you don't need to store IP numbers.
For non-logged in users you can replace IPs with hashed values, and the hash function can vary over time. This way you can still detect click behaviour from a single IP address over time (until the hash function changes).

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As the GP said, though, Google collects data first and then think up use cases later. Storing
IP address would be useful for, say, finding correlation between physical location and items
watched. Though Google could have just kept the network part of the address, or at least drop
the last byte, with no less of effectiveness but much better privacy for its users.