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Comment by navjack27 | Hacker News Reader

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People lose access to gmail and google photos all the time too, fwiw.

I think the point navjack27 is trying to make is that YouTube is fundamentally the wrong tool for the job. It's intended to be a platform where users can share content, not a data storage service.

Yes. I would extend that. An external hosted service - Google, Microsoft, whatever - wrong tool for the job. Great for easy access but not really a long-term repository. You can lose access to the account through so many ways. And there's no guarantee these services will always be there. Get a few flash drives. Do some backups. Maybe even store some "offsite" with a relative. Just have to remember to update periodically.

>Get a few flash drives. Do some backups.

I'd advise using mechanical HDDs instead. The portable USB-connected ones are quite inexpensive these days. The problem with flash is that it loses charge over time and your data can disappear. This shouldn't happen if you plug it in and power it up regularly, but for something you want to just store and forget about and maybe look at again in 5 or 10 years, it's not a safe storage method.

If a video is set to private, doesn't that mean that knowing the link won't work unless I'm signed into the right account?

That doesn't help.

Years ago I tried uploading my daughter's recital to youtube as a unlisted/private video to share with out of state relatives.

Thanks to the music, it got an instant copyright strike. That was the last time I uploaded to youtube :-/

*facepalm*

And that would presumably be evidence of however many doofuses trying to upload their entire music library to YouTube privately.

It both doesn't make sense - you're making a private collection - and also does; YouTube have a for-profit music streaming service.

I guess we're now entering an era where we don't just have to worry about *just* paperclip maximization, but also the dimension of "how many paperclips the humans are leaving in the training data when they walk away from the LLM" :/ - in this case, if you upload 1000 songs into a private playlist then fine, maybe penalize that. But for a single video? That's messed up.

Edit: never mind, I've been corrected below, sorry. (Original wrong comment follows for context.)

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No, YouTube has no concept of authorized viewers the way Google Docs/Drive does.

YouTube private videos only need the URL.

You're thinking of "unlisted". There is also a "private" option where you can invite people by Google Account that they have to be logged into.

I don’t think that’s accurate. YouTube has “unlisted” and “private”. What you refer to is unlisted. Private is only for the owner of the video.

And also for anyone you explicitly share it with, they have to be logged in.

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