Judge Louis Stanton ruled that YouTube had to turn over user data to Viacom, that ruling shocked most privacy watchers.

A bit of good news comes in that Viacom has agreed to allow YouTube to mask users’ ID and IP addresses:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25…

Please note however:

In limited circumstances, it may still be possible to track records to a specific individual based on that person’s viewing habits, as Time Warner Inc.’s AOL discovered when it released to academic researchers some 19 million search requests made over three months. AOL substituted numeric IDs for the subscribers’ real user names, yet the items searched produced enough clues to track down some of the users and identify them by name.

To those so inclined XTube and other such services are not included in the Viacom lawsuit.