Adult content “hidden” on YouTube
January 17, 2017
Adult videos and pirate content are secretly being hidden on YouTube. According to a report by TorrentFreak, pirates are using the site’s video hosting services to host the videos.
YouTube has rules banning both sexual content and pirated videos, meaning that none of the videos should be available on the site. But many pirates have found a way around that restriction, meaning that they are able to use Google’s reliable hosting services without having them taken down.
YouTube’s Content-ID software scans videos and compares it with others to work out whether it includes copyrighted content, but it also uses reports of abuse from users and staff to find out problem videos. But pirates are able to get around that by uploading video and not publicly listing it, which means that they can embed it on their own site. That means that it gets served to users straight from Google, but won’t be seen on YouTube or by the company’s Content-ID system or administrators.
Since the videos can still be embedded into external sites, pirates and others are still able to host them on their own pages and get the traffic and ad revenue from doing so. But they do not have to pay for the video hosting and can use YouTube’s reliable services.
Google’s public transparency report shows that it receives tens of thousands of complaints about people using the GoogleVideo.com domain, which is how the pirated YouTube videos show up to users.