Is YouTube's New AI Judging What You Watch? | This Week in Privacy #14 (Aug. 15, 2025)

Announcements Livestreams
1

Join us Invalid date for This Week In Privacy #14, to catch up on the latest Privacy Guides updates and to discuss trending news in the privacy space.

During the livesteam we’ll answer viewer questions. If you have a question for us, please leave a comment in this forum thread or the YouTube chat.

4 Likes
3

5 PM what time zone?

4

The time is determined by the timezone on your system. If you click the time it show in will different timezones - it sounds like for you it’s at 5pm.

1 Like
5

I’m curious what adverse effects Youtube’s age verification will have on alternative frontends. Peertube, Invidious, etc.

2 Likes
6

Putting on my tinfoil hat here. I think that’s part of the endgame for youtube (and many large service providers as a whole). They’re starting off with the “protect the kids” thing because it’s easy to sate peoples’ concerns with that argument. The initial wave of verifications will pass and then some months later a new boogeyman will be created that they say more verifications will solve. It’ll come in waves until everyone’s encountered the ID checkpoint and youtube will become inaccessible without it.

I really, really, really so badly hope that isn’t ultimately what’ll happen. But I have a hard time believing that such a behemoth like youtube/google is totally content only carding a fraction of the population and letting the rest of us roam free without handing over the keys to our anonymity

1 Like
7

After KOSA passes, it’ll happen. The point is to 1) raise the wall on all the walled gardens online, 2) ensure that it’s YOUR data that’s being collected, 3) manipulate you to such a degree that Google has a say in every single purchase you make in your entire life.

8

I’m not sure where you got the idea this is Youtube’s endgame. AFAIK age verification (“adulthood estimation” may be more precise?) is not Youtube’s idea, “protect the children” is not Youtube’s narrative but is today’s government boogeyman, and Youtube is being or will be forced by governments to estimate viewers’ age.

At the same time, Youtube has long had its own agenda for watching viewers: surveillance capitalism. Not just age estimation but collecting/estimating all sorts of info.

The following is pure conjecture. The “protect the children” narrative may provide Youtube with a little more cover to do surveillance and AI, but may hurt their profit motive by forcing Youtube to block viewers who are estimated as “child” and discourage people (viewers and channels) affected by blocking.

11

Catching up with this now.

More feedback or suggestions for @jordan and @jonah (not necessarily related to this week’s video but in general for these discussions/news rundowns you have every week):

  1. Perhaps you can have new guest speaker or other staff members of Privacy Guides every week so the community hears from more PG voices and what they think about what’s what or the topic of discussion every week. This will add more nuance and opinions, views, etc. to the discussion.
  2. Definitely try to bring in outside speakers every now and then as well. This could be other prominent privacy advocates or tech journalists focused on issues related to open internet, freedom, tech, privacy, security, etc. Would love to have more industry voices on here. Folks from EFF and other similar entities would be a bonus every now and then to properly “educate” this from a more “expert” POV. For example: sometimes you can bring in the journalist who reported on something important you may be talking about. Or sometimes you may want to bring in a legal expert from EFF that can better explain the subject matter from a more practical or a legal POV explaining how these types of bad news affects us all and why we ought to fight before it’s too late. I’m sure these folks may be willing to do this PSA type journalism this podcast is about pro bono for the cause.
  3. Clips that are less than a few minutes long from these videos whenever you have more clear, concise, short answers for things would be a great added value because some may be more willing to watch shorter videos than to commit to an hour to get an answer/view/opinion they want. Again, video clips but not shorts like YT shorts or TikTok.
  4. I also feel like you both can have more fun reporting on things. Be a little loud. Take a small page from Ed Zitron (from Better Offline) and call out these companies, curse them, explain the monumental idiocy of some the rules, changes, and the enshittification the tech industry and legal policies in place that enable such behaviors. Be the warranted frustrated voice for the people who don’t have a podcast so the severity of these types of terrible changes can potentially be better understood. I would prefer you both not be only “reporting the facts” but also providing the nuance and strong opinions we all ought to have to such news. Be bold. We need more stronger voices to drill in the importance to all.

Overall, I think this weekly podcast can grow a lot more and has a lot of potential. You can still tighten up the episodes a bit I feel but its been improved a lot since you started. Once you bring in more voices and prominent or industry guests/journalists on the episode every now and then, the podcast can graduate to the next level of it being a more go to place for your weekly tech and privacy news along with the likes of Surveillance Report and Firewalls Don’t Stop Dragons.

–

Thanks for taking my previous advice and suggestions seriously and incorporating those. I hope you will consider the aforementioned too even though it would mean more prep work for each episode. But that’s what I feel it would take to take this to the next level.

As with always, please take all I said well and that I wrote this with the best intentions. And I hope think about it.

3 Likes
12

Hey Johnny,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts once again! I will bring this up with the team soon, however here are my thoughts personally:

  1. Yes I do think this could be an interesting idea, we are looking into having other Privacy Guides team members on the podcast. (it’s tricky with timezones especially because we have such a global team)
  2. I think this could be a nice idea, however for now a more edited video interview style is something that we are pursuing. We have a video coming out in the next few weeks with an interview integration with an industry expert.
  3. I used to manage some other channels were we did this and it was quite successful, however my time is rather limited to producing video content (it takes a lot of time and effort to produce fully edited videos) currently so it might not be feasible to do this. We are working on making some original short form content though just not clips for now.
  4. Thanks for the feedback here, I can only speak for myself here but I’m somewhat new to live streamed off the cuff content, so I’m still getting used to it these sort of comments are helpful.

Thanks again for taking the time to write up this comment, and of course any constructive feedback is much welcomed as always.

1 Like
13

Thank you for getting back.

I totally understand, believe me - I can see the effort when watching. And I know you and the PG team will do whatever you can and your best. So, these suggestions can be added to the growing list I’m presuming you already have.

Like always, look forward to your next video.

1 Like
14

The second I see any kind of age verification will be the day that I officially block as many Google things as I possibly can and won’t just let them exist in the background and occasionally accidentally stumble across a domain, usually to just close it anyways but I will aggressively push others to kick them right to the curb also. I will not verify a single solitaire site or service and if I do it will 100% be a fake!

15

Why wait until then? Why not begin doing that today? Google is terrible anyway and is an assault on your user privacy.

1 Like