YouTube-Tools finds every user comment you make, artificial intelligence creates his profile and, after analysis, determines the likely place of residence along with other data.
The tool originated as a research service for League of Legends users. It now uses a modified Mistral speech model to generate a report on YouTube users based on their conversations. The developer claims that the service is intended for use by the police. However, anyone can sign up and it costs $20 per month. All you need to get started is a credit card and an address.
The service obviously threatens privacy and demonstrates well that people are not so anonymous on the Internet. The site generates a report in seconds and provides enough data for artificial intelligence to identify the commenter’s identity. YouTube-Tools also violates YouTube’s privacy policy:
«Public search engines can only extract data in accordance with YouTube’s robots.txt file or with YouTube’s prior written permission», — the document says.
404 Media reporter Matthew Gault put YouTube Tools to the test. He chose a random commenter — almost instantly, the site found dozens of his comments on several videos and created an artificial intelligence report that said, among other things:
«Possible location/region: The presence of comments in Italian and references to «X Factor Italia» and Italian cuisine hint at an association with Italy. …Political/social/cultural views: Some comments reflect a certain level of criticism of the interviewers and social norms (e.g. comments on masculinity), which indicates engagement with contemporary cultural debates. However, no overt political positions were expressed».
The website from LoL-Archiver developers was launched a few days ago. There is also the nHentai-Archiver service, which provides a full history of user comments on the popular adult manga website. Kick-Tools provides a full chat history or blocking history of a user on the Kick streaming site. Twitch-Tools provides the chat history of a Twitch account sorted by timestamp and all channels where the interaction took place.
According to the developers, the site is intended for private detectives, journalists, and law enforcement. They allegedly provided the tool for use by police in Portugal, Belgium, and «other European countries».
«To prevent abuse, we only allow people with legitimate purposes to access the website. We ask users to accept our Terms of Use and send targeted KYC (customer due diligence) requests to people who we believe have an unlawful reason for using our site. If we find that a user does not have a legitimate purpose for using our service in accordance with the Terms of Use, we reserve the right to terminate that user’s access to the site», — the developers responded to the journalist’s request.
However, YouTube-Tools works on the principle of «access first, then request for confirmation». The journalist was able to create an account and start viewing information in a matter of minutes after paying for a month of use. The service did not ask any questions and did not require any additional information. Obviously, the legality and The integrity of such services is questionable. So we can advise anyone to be careful about leaving comments on the Internet.
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