I and another 103045 people like the video that I did not watch

I want to tell you about the story that happened to me recently. I am not an expert on Internet safety, and probably made wrong conclusions, I hope in this case, they will correct me.

I do not use YouTube too often, and even less often I like it there. Therefore, when several records unexpectedly appeared in my story that I liked some videos, I immediately noticed it. Frustrated, without even paying particular attention to what exactly they were for the videos, I decided that this was a YouTube glitch, I removed the likes and forgot. But later it turned out that not only likes appeared in history.

It turned out that at about the same time I was “watching” other videos. The content was such that I immediately realized that I could not watch it, not just like likes, and of course the first thing I thought about was viruses, where I used my gmail to register and what I could be threatened with with a password.

In principle, there was nothing terrible among the “scanned”: a music video, a review of a car, incomprehensible events, and something else political. However, neither I, nor any of those who theoretically could use my computer, in theory should have been watching this.
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I checked that the password works, it means that the account was not hijacked, but somehow it clocked up due to my views and likes. I decided to search, can any data leakage or vulnerability in YouTube? First of all, there were several messages like this on the habr: YouTube has blocked the account

The user ivakin discovered that a series had been posted from his account and was blocked. All attempts to clarify the situation failed, so he decided that robots were sitting there and proving something impossible for them.

From the correspondence found with YouTube’s support, it became clear that, as they claim, such cases are not dealt with by robots, but by people, and for just their well-known reasons decide whether the user is actually hacked into an account, or he is cheating and himself maliciously violated copyright, for which subject to eternal expulsion from YouTube.

It didn’t make me feel better at all: for now, instead of me, only clips are watching and likes are being put, but what if this is just the beginning? Why would anyone upload movies and TV shows through stolen accounts when they are quickly blocked anyway? Content terrorists? Trying to draw attention to the injustice of life, banning the innocent?

I began to search further and found the following interesting thread on the Google forums. Here is a translation of some messages from there:

It happens to me too. And what videos do you have? I have hard rock and metal, I never listen to such music.

Here it is again (this time the videos were decently, but I still did not watch them). I do not understand what is happening.

I have the same problem! I have in the history of views disgusting porn! My children of 7 and 8 years old use my account to watch something childish, this error must be urgently fixed !!! Thank God, children haven’t visited YouTube lately. Wth ???

Thanks for this thread. I had just scolded my son, because I noticed in the history of watching adult videos, he almost in tears swore that he hadn’t watched anything like that.

Why is Google not responding to this issue? I only have kids videos, and my girlfriend has porn, this is wrong ... and if suddenly a pedo or terrorist videos, and everyone thinks that I did it ... it becomes damn dangerous.

Just looked at your story. Tons of porn ... What the fuck ?!

In the thread - reports of such problems and requests to understand from 2011 to April 2013, and all without success. They are advised to change the password, ask if anyone else could have logged in from their computer, or maybe they went to YouTube somewhere at work and did not log in. Users respond that they did not forget anything, they did not give anyone the password, after the onset of symptoms, the passwords were changed, and nothing helped - videos that they didn’t watch and likes that they didn’t put on continue to appear in the story.

I was glad that not only I had such a problem, I continued my search and soon the answer was found. Everything turned out unexpectedly simple. My account had nothing to do with hijacking accounts. Just on some sites there are scripts for cheating views and likes YouTube. In this case, not necessarily the theme of the site itself has at least some relevance to the topic of videos that are wound. But if the user is logged in to YouTube, the script uses this data for hidden video launch. However, they do not recognize the password, so there is no harm, except that in the recommendations for viewing you will soon see very unexpected things.