Viacom has recently obtained a court order that requires Google to hand over a complete list of every video watched by YouTube users. These logs will include the login names and IP addresses of the users.

Google are now asking Viacom if they can anonymize the logs before turning them over; Viacom hasn’t responded yet. But this privacy nightmare could have been greatly reduced if Google had anonymized the data in advance.

Google’s privacy policy states that they keep personally identifiable information for 18 months. There is no real reason to do so; Google can achieve everything they need even if they anonymize their search logs after just one month, and it’s time users told them to do so.