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“Older unlisted videos will be made private unless you opt out”

support.google.com

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Re: “Older unlisted videos will be made private unless you opt out”

#31

Post by btown »

A welcome move for individuals who may have embarrassing content as Unlisted links. Future politicians will thank you. But... this will hit B2B product training and product marketing libraries hard. Many companies I've seen have help pages with embedded or linked videos for features not updated in years, and many of those embeds are Unlisted videos so that they're only seen in the context of their help article, not promoted randomly by the YouTube algorithm. Some may have legacy content on legacy "X Corp Training" YouTube channels where nobody knows how to opt out of this policy shift. And especially post-COVID, they may no longer have the same technology and training teams, if they have any at all. They may not even have the YouTube login.

I could see a policy where YouTube made Unlisted videos Private that only had referrers from social media; this would be a welcome compromise to ensure non-guessability of URLs. But I can also see how this could become complicated and political. And companies using YouTube in this way aren't really contributing to YouTube's revenue materially, so there's not much incentive relative to the reputational risk of people guessing Unlisted links.

I shudder to think that healthcare professionals or heavy-machinery operators might be relying on these links to be trained in systems they use, will start to see broken links, will never report them back to the right people at their system providers, will just not get the full training, will make mistakes, and might cause harm as a result.

Security is not the only component of safety, and impacts need to be evaluated holistically.

Re: “Older unlisted videos will be made private unless you opt out”

#32

Post by MauranKilom »

jackson1442 wrote: post #25
falcolas wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't to me. Patreon tier-restricted videos, not to mention family shared videos, fall into this category, and not all creators are savy enough to know they need to do this.

Did they send an email to affected accounts? There seems to be a logical reason for this (newer unlisted videos have a more secure url generator), so I’d say this is neutral at worst.

Some of my videos would be affected and I got an email from them. Seems reasonable to me.

Of course, there is probably a large number of currently unlisted videos from accounts that are no longer active, which would effectively be lost after this change. Unfortunate.

Re: “Older unlisted videos will be made private unless you opt out”

#33

Post by hellbannedguy »

beebeepka wrote: post #5

I think it's mostly a good thing but it's Google so there must be an angle. Am I too jaded?

I think it might be legal.

When Google bought Youtube Videos, I followed their directions on the new password, etc.

Something went wrong, and I couldn't delete, or edit my own videos.

They weren't that embarassening, but I used youtube originally as kind of a diary, or todo list.

I tried for awhile to get them off, but failed, and just gave up.

I did reach a human in advertising one day, and she told me, "Those issues are not what they hired he fooor. Try the help boards?". (She brought back memories of certian new college grads, and I realized how difficult it is to talk to a human at Google.)

Anyway--the vids are still up their years later, with people telling me how lousy they are. I just commented on my own videos. Telling people at one time, some uploaders just posted without thinking about clicks.

Re: “Older unlisted videos will be made private unless you opt out”

#34

Post by Causality1 »

barosl wrote: post #2

That's unfortunate. I have a few videos which seems to have been forgotten even by their uploaders. Those videos would probably not be updated. I guess I need to back them up manually.

Yes. I always tell people that if they really love a YouTube video they need to archive it themselves. Tons and tons of content gets erased all the time for many different reasons. Just recently I found two of my favorite channels, popular around a decade ago, had deleted almost all their content because their jokes were too offensive for today's audience and they wanted to project a more mature aesthetic. That would've been a huge chunk of my early adulthood gone forever if I hadn't already had copies of all their videos.

Re: “Older unlisted videos will be made private unless you opt out”

#35

Post by bmurphy1976 »

barosl wrote: post #2

That's unfortunate. I have a few videos which seems to have been forgotten even by their uploaders. Those videos would probably not be updated. I guess I need to back them up manually.

I have one video in my favorites that is marked as unavailable. This drives me crazy I'll never know what that video was. I only have a couple videos in my favorites and every single one of them is important to me.

If you can back them up.

Re: “Older unlisted videos will be made private unless you opt out”

#36

Post by chx »

llacb47 wrote: post #28
judge2020 wrote: post #20

The thing that makes this fishy is that I also received an email for my Google Workspace organization about link sharing changing for Google Drive for a security update, and the date it initially takes effect is the same day at this YouTube thing, July 23. https://support.google.com/a/answer/10685032?hl=en Could something have happened across their entire Zanzibar/ ACL infrastructure?

Could you explain what that is?

https://research.google/pubs/pub48190/

Re: “Older unlisted videos will be made private unless you opt out”

#37

Post by globular-toast »

barosl wrote: post #2

That's unfortunate. I have a few videos which seems to have been forgotten even by their uploaders. Those videos would probably not be updated. I guess I need to back them up manually.

This is what I use youtubedl for. I don't trust Google to keep stuff I'm interested in available forever.

Re: “Older unlisted videos will be made private unless you opt out”

#38

Post by tenerifevisitor »

judge2020 wrote: post #20

The thing that makes this fishy is that I also received an email for my Google Workspace organization about link sharing changing for Google Drive for a security update, and the date it initially takes effect is the same day at this YouTube thing, July 23. https://support.google.com/a/answer/10685032?hl=en Could something have happened across their entire Zanzibar/ ACL infrastructure?

What is Zanzibar?

Re: “Older unlisted videos will be made private unless you opt out”

#39

Post by carl_dr »

judge2020 wrote: post #15

So the reasoning makes it sound like there was potentially an exploit that made it easy to find unlisted videos? Were the video IDs deterministic perhaps?

Maybe their old scheme, when divided by the number of videos, was getting to the point where it was feasible you could brute force finding unlisted videos.

The old scheme had 7.3 x 10^19 ids (11 chars, base 64, thanks Tom Scott!). Suspiciously close to the max value of a 64-bit int, hmmm …

Assume a billion videos and you’re down to 10^10 - a one in a 10 billion chance isn’t much chance, but it’s far from secure.

(I’m ignoring the fact that only a small %age of videos are unlisted I guess, but I think the point still stands.)

Re: “Older unlisted videos will be made private unless you opt out”

#40

Post by tech234a »

judge2020 wrote: post #20

The thing that makes this fishy is that I also received an email for my Google Workspace organization about link sharing changing for Google Drive for a security update, and the date it initially takes effect is the same day at this YouTube thing, July 23. https://support.google.com/a/answer/10685032?hl=en Could something have happened across their entire Zanzibar/ ACL infrastructure?

YouTube mentions the Drive change on their blog post[1], and Drive mentions the YouTube change on theirs[2].

[1]: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/update-youtube-unlisted...

[2]: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/06/drive-file-l...

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