[mimimihaha]

While working on a programming project for one of my classes I found an unlisted youtube video in a Google search that demonstrated exactly how to complete the project. I highly doubt the kid who uploaded it wanted anyone to see. It consistently showed up in Google searches too and was uploaded the same day. There is something definitely wrong with the way youtube protects its unlisted videos. I really wouldn’t be surprised if the article wasn’t exaggerating at all.

[userbinator]

It may have been shared with someone else, and the original page --- which was at one point publicly accessible --- containing the link (perhaps a tweet) was removed, but Google still crawled and indexed whatever it was pointed to.

If you don't want content becoming public, keep it behind a loginwall --- but that's not what "unlisted links" do.

[ItsMe000001]

The use case I'm used to for unlisted videos is edX courses. The videos are all hosted on Youtube and unlisted.

Example: https://youtu.be/-RR1qt41oBg

I don't think they care how secure being "unlisted" is. I also don't think that using free Youtube video hosting for secured(!) private videos is a sue case anyone would reasonably expect Google to provide. I think it's a convenience feature, not meant to let you skip on hosting costs for actually (truly) private videos.

I'm happy to be corrected, as I said, I only know one use case and figured out the second half that I just said on the fly, my quick thoughts given the little I know.

EDIT: Seems to be pretty well known, I found several pages with this kind of explanation: https://www.pagecloud.com/blog/private-vs-unlisted-youtube

> YouTube’s UNLISTED video option gives users something between the Public and Private settings. Unlisted videos can be seen and shared by anyone with the video link, including those who do not have a Google Account.

Given that I found quite a few links with the same explanation, it seems that most people understand what "unlisted" means very well, given that most of those links I found were non-Google sources. So somebody wrote a blog post because they misunderstood a Youtube feature?

[pbhjpbhj]

It's a pretty big search space but one presumably could brute force it and create a site having links to all/lots of unlisted content.

[duskwuff]

As mentioned in another comment on this post, the search space is 2^64 IDs large. It's not practical to find unlisted videos via "brute force".

[ItsMe000001]

Yes... and your point is? :-) Especially, what's the relation to my comment? As I said, it is not supposed to be "secret" pr "secure" at all.

[pbhjpbhj]

That was the entire point, it wasn't a contradiction, merely a reflection. I've read the OP now, seems that one of the sites mentioned has done just that.