Instead of being pissed at the judge, people should be pissed at youtube/google for actually keeping track of what videos every single user/ip watched. Just goes to show that Google is most likely tracking every single thing you do online
You sound as if you are more concerned about your YouTube history because you have more to hide there than in your medical history. Surely you can imagine people for whom the opposite is true -- where some otherwise innocuous medical fact would hurt them if made public?
...Like people who adopted but don't want their kids to know, people who have recovered from cancer, people with mental conditions, people treated for STDs, people with sex changes, people who have had (even a false-) positive HIV test, people with a history of drug abuse, people who have had abortions, etc. Some reasons are just embarrassing, some may get you turned down from a job, some are blackmail material that could end a marriage or political career.
This is not something I worry about. If someone won't hire you because of a medical condition, you didn't want to work for them anyway. Better to find that out before you're entrenched.
some are blackmail material that could end a marriage or political career
Why keep records of things you don't want people to know about?
This is not something I worry about. If someone won't hire you because of a medical condition, you didn't want to work for them anyway. Better to find that out before you're entrenched.
Maybe, maybe not. The machinations of hiring are not necessarily representative of the rest of the work environment. And if a person with a politically unpopular medical condition gets turned down from a job, they won't know the reason. They're unlikely to say "Thank goodness I didn't get hired." -- more likely: "I wonder if my condition had any influence on the decision." These people would be much happier with greater confidentiality.
Why keep records of things you don't want people to know about?
In case they are medically relevant. It's not clear from the Google summary whether the patient has editorial control over the contents of their medical records, but it's not hard to imagine a service where they do not -- no doctor wants a patient to be able to remove notes on drug dependency issues from their file. Lists of operations and medications are medically relevant and potentially embarrassing; even something as simple as a list of vaccinations can tell you where a person grew up, which could be a politically sensitive issue.
That may be so, but this is still just a terrible, terrible ruling. If the linked article is correct, it's the entire surfing habits of every youtube user, ever. A list of users who watched the Viacom videos in question should clearly be discoverable? This? It's a disaster.
IANAL, obviously, but I have to believe there will be some way to appeal this order and get it sanified, no?
