According to this article on ComputerWorld.com Viacom has agreed to allow Google and YouTube to obfuscate the user names and IP addresses of those who view videos on YouTube. That is good news for all of us whether or not you feel that you have something to hide. It is still not a good thing that the Judge felt that our privacy had no place in this but hats off to Viacom and Google for working out this agreement.
One thing that we have to keep in mind is that when we allow our rights to be eroded little by little we will wake up one day and realize that we no longer have any rights. This is how we end up in places we don't want to be. Every time we give something up or compromise a core value, belief or right we open up the way for a little more to be taken away at another time. A good example from life is telling a "little white lie". We think that it won't hurt but then we have to remember what we said, who we said it to, who knows the truth, etc... Then if we are called on to defend it we have to either fess up or continue to lie and slip further down the slippery slope.
To tie this into information security this is also how a hacker works his way into our network. He starts out looking for a small flaw or vulnerability and then over time he increases his level of rights and authority. We have to be diligent to keep our systems, applications and infrastructure in good order to prevent him from finding and exploiting flaws. If we compromise little things then later the big things will come back to bite us.
