YouTube Corporate Disinformation on Privacy Policy

Searching for information on YouTube's privacy policy at help.youtube.com using keywords "viewing history" and "privacy" gave this as a result: Is there a way to save history permanently? - How do I...? | Google Groups

The reply, which is from a username with a YouTube prefix and logo, says "For privacy reasons, YouTube doesn't store your viewing history. " This is in direct contrast to the litigation of Viacom v. Google which revealed that Youtube's logging database stores all viewing history for each video regardless if a viewer is logged into the site or not. The post was made on August 8, 2008 which seems to imply that an update has been made to this archiving policy but I have only found mention of Google updating it's privacy policy to partially anonymize logged IP addresses after 9 months [1]. Additionally, any videos viewed by an IP address used to sign in to YouTube can be linked to an account name.

Here are some excerpts from the YouTube privacy policy:

Usage Information. We may record information about your usage, such as when you use YouTube, the channels, groups, and favorites you subscribe to, the contacts you communicate with, the videos you watch, and the frequency and size of data transfers, as well as information you display or click on in YouTube (including UI elements, settings, and other information). If you are logged in, we may associate that information with your account. We may use clear GIFs (a.k.a. "Web Beacons") in HTML-based emails sent to our users to track which emails are opened by recipients.
...
We use both your personally identifiable information and certain non-personally-identifiable information (such as anonymous user usage data, cookies, IP addresses, browser type, clickstream data, etc.) to improve the quality and design of the YouTube Sites and to create new features, promotions, functionality, and services by storing, tracking, analyzing, and processing user preferences and trends, as well as user activity and communications.
...
You may clear your viewing history at any time through the "Viewing History" feature.

source: www.youtube.com...

What this does not mention is that the viewing history stored in the logging database is not deleted as revealed by Viacom v. Google!

Most alarming, replies for the thread have been disabled. The integrity of the YouTube corporation is now in question as it seems to be obfuscating (even lying about?) the extent of its logging database to pacify privacy concerns.

[edit on 4-3-2009 by tmk81]