YouTube Privacy Notice
Updated as of June 19, 2007
The Google Privacy Policy describes how Google and its subsidiaries treat personal information when you use Google services, including information provided when you use YouTube. In addition, the following describes privacy practices specific to YouTube. To understand how we treat the information you give us as you use YouTube, you should read this policy and the Google Privacy Policy.
Personal Information
- Non-Account Activity. You can watch videos on YouTube without having a YouTube Account or a Google Account.
- Account-Related Activity. Certain other activities on YouTube—like uploading videos, posting comments, or watching restricted videos—require you to have a YouTube Account or a Google Account. We ask for some personal information when you create a YouTube Account or a Google Account, including your email address and a password, which is used to protect your account from unauthorized access. A Google Account allows you to access many of our services that require registration.
- Usage Information. We may record information about your usage, such as when you use YouTube, the channels, groups, and favorites you subscribe to, the contacts you communicate with, and the frequency and size of data transfers, as well as information you display or click on in YouTube (including UI elements, settings, and other information). If you are logged in, we may associate that information with your account. We may use clear GIFs (a.k.a. "Web Beacons") in HTML-based emails sent to our users to track which emails are opened by recipients.
- Content Uploaded to Site. Any personal information or video content that you voluntarily disclose online (on discussion boards, in messages and chat areas, within your playback or profile pages, etc.) becomes publicly available and can be collected and used by others.
Uses
- If you submit personally identifiable information to us through the YouTube Sites, we use your personal information to operate, maintain, and provide to you the features and functionality of the YouTube Sites, as well as provide special personalized features to you.
- Your account name (not your email address) is displayed to other Users when you upload videos or send messages through the YouTube Sites and other Users can contact you through messages and comments. Any videos that you submit to the YouTube Sites may be redistributed through the internet and other media channels, and may be viewed by the general public.
- We do not use your email address or other personally identifiable information to send commercial or marketing messages without your consent or except as part of a specific program or feature for which you will have the ability to opt-in or opt-out. We may, however, use your email address without further consent for non-marketing or administrative purposes (such as notifying you of major YouTube Site changes or for customer service purposes).
- We use both your personally identifiable information and certain non-personally-identifiable information (such as anonymous User usage data, cookies, IP addresses, browser type, clickstream data, etc.) to improve the quality and design of the YouTube Sites and to create new features, promotions, functionality, and services by storing, tracking, and analyzing User preferences and trends.
- We use cookies, clear gifs, and log file information to: (a) store information so that you will not have to re-enter it during your visit or the next time you visit the YouTube Sites; (b) provide custom, personalized content and information; (c) monitor the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns; (d) monitor aggregate metrics such as total number of visitors, pages viewed, etc.; and (e) track your entries, submissions, and status in promotions, sweepstakes, and contests.
Your Choices
- You may, of course, decline to submit personally identifiable information through the YouTube Sites, in which case you can still view videos and explore the YouTube Sites, but YouTube may not be able to provide certain services to you. Some advanced YouTube features may, for authentication purposes, require you to sign up for other Google services like Google Checkout or AdSense. The privacy notices of those services govern the use of your personal information associated with them.
- You may update or correct your personal profile information and email preferences at any time by visiting your account profile page.
More Information
Google adheres to the US Safe Harbor privacy principles. For more information about the Safe Harbor framework or our registration, see the Department of Commerce's web site.
For more information about our privacy practices, go to Google's full privacy policy.
For questions concerning the product or your account, please check out the Google Help page.