Nortel Buzzboard

It’s the afternoon before a long 4th of July weekend here in the U.S. Typical prime “goofing off” time for many 9 to 5 white collar workers. So you fire up your browser and wander around on YouTube for a while…what’s it going to hurt, right?

Well today a U.S. court has ruled that Google (who owns YouTube) must divulge the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched any video on YouTube. Per this article, Google must provide Viacom (who won the lawsuit) a viewing log which “contains the log-in ID of users, the computer IP address (online identifier) and video clip details.”

Yikes.

Now this doesn’t mean all our YouTube viewing habits will be posted on the Internet by Monday, but this is being seen as a landmark case that could affect future related privacy issues.

So what can you do? Admit it, you’d rather not have your boss see that you’ve been spending your days watching all 161 video episodes of AfterWorld.

Here’s the answer — quickly go to Nortel’s YouTube channel and start watching. Since we started actively maintaining it a few months ago, we’ve added all sorts of useful video. “From the show floor” videos from tradeshows, demos, energy efficiency info, interviews, etc. And we’re putting new stuff up all the time.

Visit often — and then if the worst-case scenario happens and you find your YouTube log in your boss’s hands at your next performance evaluation, you’ll have lots of useful videos on your log (and me to thank).