YouTube Shares TMI

YouTube is all about sharing. Share some videos. Share some revenue if you are a affiliate partner. Since they are in the sharing mood, they decided to go ahead and share some more stuff.

They share your zip/postal code even if you don’t list a home town. Say you edited your profile to not show your age (or first/last name or anything else). YouTube still shares it. The only way to protect the information is to go in and fudge it all on your account settings.

You can’t change your age once you’ve made your account. If you want to truly hide your age, there is a setting to do so under Account -> Profile Settings -> Personal Details -> and mark Do not display my age. Of course erasing all this info doesn’t matter now because sites that have been scraping it already have it all posted.

It appears that this was recently discovered by users in the help section because a member noticed their account info posted on a 3rd party site. The thread also has instructions on how to that grab member info thanks to the API tool.

At the time of this posting, YouTube staff had yet to step in on the thread. Who knows, maybe it isn’t a big deal and we’ve all already agreed to share what YouTube didn’t appear to share. In my opinion though, if I don’t want to share my identifiable information (First/Last Name, Zipcode, Age, etc) with YouTube users then why would I want to share them with anyone who happens to play around with the API tool?