Youtube problem

The problem started after YouTube displayed videos on Orkut, . 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.

This is what he did

He created a YouTube account, uploaded some videos, and shared them. Then he created a Orkut account.Then he linked it to the YouTube videos he uploaded.

He used to browsed YouTube each day . 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.


But the good news is that this problem is fixed now you no longer need to worry