Privacy News Google is reading text in YouTube videos for search crawling without user consent

LASER_oneXM

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Feb 4, 2016
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Videos uploaded as private or unlisted are subject to being crawled, but Google's documentation does not acknowledge this behavior at all.

Google is using optical character recognition (OCR) techniques to crawl URLs found in YouTube videos—including private videos—according to programmer Austin Burk, first reported by Naked Security. Burk found an XSS vulnerability in a different website, which he was reproducing using screen capture software as part of a responsible disclosure package. After uploading the video to YouTube, he found evidence of crawling activity with the user agent "Google-Youtube-Links" in server logs on a system he controls.

According to Burk, the URLs were visible in the address bar during the video, which was uploaded to YouTube, but kept unlisted. Burk then made a private video to test the behavior, which occurred in the exact same fashion as the unlisted video created for responsible disclosure.
 

DeepWeb

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I think if you upload a video to their platform you are telling them to process it the way they want it to be presented. I've actually seen the benefits of YouTube recognizing text in videos and things that have been said. It makes it dramatically easier to find a video. It also helps blind people know what is in the video. Please remember this :D
 
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