Feed: Slashdot
Feed Link: https://slashdot.org/
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Title: Developer Builds Tool That Scrapes YouTube Comments, Uses AI To
Predict Where Users Live

Link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/05/30/21332...

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.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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