Following up from a previous post, Google is asking Viacom to respect users’ privacy and let them to anonymize the logs before handling them over to Viacom under the court order. “We are disappointed the court granted Viacom’s overreaching demand for viewing history,” Google said.

Efluxmedia.com says that Viacom had said in a New York Times interview, “The information that is produced by Google is going to be limited to outside advisors who can use it solely for the purpose of enforcing our rights against YouTube.”

So the data is going to go to third parties. Somehow, that doesn’t make me feel any better about user privacy. We can hope that there will be a legal challenge mounted in the next few days against releasing user data unfiltered to Viacom.