The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) released a statement yesterday titled Court Ruling Will Expose Viewing Habits of YouTube Users.

The statement was in response to a federal court ruling requiring Google to hand over YouTube customer data to ViaCom. Google will provide ViaCom with a list of all YouTube customers and records on every video they have ever watched on YouTube.

Privacy advocates like the EFF are outraged — but I believe they are completely missing the point here.

ViaCom possessing this data is not significantly different than Google possessing this data. If Google didn’t want to hand over this data, they should not have recorded it. Google has no legitimate business reason for maintaining this intrusive level of detail about YouTube members.

Public libraries periodically destroy records of which books their members have checked out. This protects their members in case of a data breach by either hackers or nosy government busybodies. Google should have the same respect for individual privacy as a public library.

Unfortunately, Google’s “Do No Evil” mantra appears to be nothing more than a marketing slogan.