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YouTube Fixes Privacy Issue
David Utter
Staff Writer
2007-05-30
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
What had appeared to pose a serious privacy concern with YouTube and observed by several people for about a month has been corrected.
 | | YouTube Fixes Privacy Issue |  |
The problem stemmed from the way YouTube displayed videos on Orkut, Google's social networking site. McAfee researcher Vinay Mahadik summarized the problem in his blog post:
Long story short, until it was fixed, the online logged-in browsing habits of users who have uploaded content on YouTube got leaked to the whole world when those videos were viewed via Orkut. I have seen some explicit/implicit loss of privacy via Web 2.0isms like collaborative filtering (a la Amazon/Delicious) or interestingness (a la Flickr), but this approach seems unprecedented.
Mahadik created a YouTube account, uploaded some videos, and shared them. Then he created a separate Google account for use with Orkut. From Orkut, he linked to the YouTube videos he uploaded.
"YouTube recently introduced this feature, wherein, when you play a video from inside Orkut, it shows you videos "related" to that video as a fish-eye list at the bottom," Mahadik wrote.
He browsed YouTube each day while logged in with that account. Mahadik found that viewing his uploaded YouTube videos through Orkut from an unrelated Orkut account showed the videos he had browsed while logged into YouTube in Orkut's fish-eye list.
"All those videos listed as related were either 1. from my YouTube favorites list, 2. a video I had seen often on YouTube while logged in, or 3. related to the general theme of videos I was watching while logged in," he said.
Until corrected, the feature could have permitted aggressive data-miners to grab some well-formed profiles of YouTube user habits.
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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