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Privacy AI Youtube

Developer Builds Tool That Scrapes YouTube Comments, Uses AI To Predict Where Users Live (404media.co) 34

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: If you've left a comment on a YouTube video, a new website claims it might be able to find every comment you've ever left on any video you've ever watched. Then an AI can build a profile of the commenter and guess where you live, what languages you speak, and what your politics might be. The service is called YouTube-Tools and is just the latest in a suite of web-based tools that started life as a site to investigate League of Legends usernames. Now it uses a modified large language model created by the company Mistral to generate a background report on YouTube commenters based on their conversations. Its developer claims it's meant to be used by the cops, but anyone can sign up. It costs about $20 a month to use and all you need to get started is a credit card and an email address.

The tool presents a significant privacy risk, and shows that people may not be as anonymous in the YouTube comments sections as they may think. The site's report is ready in seconds and provides enough data for an AI to flag identifying details about a commenter. The tool could be a boon for harassers attempting to build profiles of their targets, and 404 Media has seen evidence that harassment-focused communities have used the developers' other tools. YouTube-Tools also appears to be a violation of YouTube's privacy policies, and raises questions about what YouTube is doing to stop the scraping and repurposing of peoples' data like this. "Public search engines may scrape data only in accordance with YouTube's robots.txt file or with YouTube's prior written permission," it says.

Developer Builds Tool That Scrapes YouTube Comments, Uses AI To Predict Where Users Live

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  • The much bigger story is this is proof LLM based systems don’t have thinking capability nor anywhere near sentience because any thinking thing exposed to the equivalent of a billion years of reading YT comments tautologically means it’s brain is gone. Goo. Why do you think my posts are so bad I had no idea I’d brain my damage but before I could turn the algorithm got me and won’t let go.
    • Lede. Burying the lede.

      And an LLM isn't learning from the YT comments, at least unless the geniuses at openAI are involved. If anyone will make another tragic AI error, it's Sam Altman.

      And that's the story for you?

      • Lede. Burying the lede.

        Pull! Bang! Whooosh! Finding the lede while totally missing the joke.

        This is interesting ... the LLM may not be learning from You Tube comments, but it seems like the Slashdot readers have learned, from their training material, that "any thinking thing exposed to the equivalent of a billion years of reading YT comments tautologically means it’s brain is gone. Goo." is a comment to be taken seriously and criticized on that basis.

        Or maybe it was intended seriously, and I'm wrong, in which case I'll a

    • The much bigger story is this is proof LLM based systems don’t have thinking capability nor anywhere near sentience because any thinking thing exposed to the equivalent of a billion years of reading YT comments tautologically means its brain is gone. Goo.

      Yeah, but you gotta admit it’s one hell of a trainer to put you on the path the becoming One with your inner sarcastic bastard.

      AIs tongue will be so sharp it’ll name its own codebase “razor cunt”. Humans fucking with it won’t stand a chance.

    • Your post doesn't prove you can't think, but it certainly proves that you didn't do so before you made the ridiculous claim that this proves anything about AI except that it can be used for morally ambiguous purposes. In no way does it prove they can't think, even if you could prove the system didn't in this case, which you can't.
  • Is Robonia a real place, or is the AI doing AI things?

    Also, I wonder how it does location much beyond continent. What happens when an Swede makes a post from Germany about American politics?

    The real outrage in this is that MY tax dollars will probably be pissed away on this horseshit.

    • by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      Agreed. A real threat needs more. No AI is going to place me within hundreds of miles of my location without data other than my post history. Altman-esque levels of hype.

  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday May 30, 2025 @06:10PM (#65417595)
    Leaking information has been a problem for a long long time. There have been models that can do this available since long before LLMs were a thing.

    For example using a computer model it's child's Play to figure out I am actually an agent of SMERSH.
  • Is there a version that works on Slashdot comments?
    We could DOX everyone here.

  • by GrahamJ ( 241784 ) on Friday May 30, 2025 @08:50PM (#65417921)

    Says company that scrapes the entire internet

  • by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Friday May 30, 2025 @09:18PM (#65417945)

    The last thing I need is for people to know where my parent's basement is.

  • Didn't South Park have an episode in which a character was complaining that his own statements were being used against him?

  • robots.txt is as laughable as putting a sticker on your door - Pleaze do not entery!
    • The golden age of robots.txt might be approaching now, as a legal tool.

      Sure, back when what it "protected" you against were search engine crawlers, its use was somewhat limited. You either benefited from search engines indexing your stuff, and if it was stuff you didn't want indexed, it probably shouldn't have been publicly accessible in the first place.

      But that changed with LLMs, where being crawled is generally 100% to the disadvantage of the creator and publisher. LLM crawlers can and apparently do ignor
  • If it already exists, it's not a prediction, it's a guess.

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention, with the possible exceptions of handguns and Tequilla. -- Mitch Ratcliffe

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