YouTube Engineering and Developers Blog: August 2016

Engineering and Developers Blog

What's happening with engineering and developers at YouTube

An updated Terms of Service and New Developer Policies for the YouTube API Services

Thursday, August 11, 2016

The updated YouTube API Services Terms and Policies are effective starting today (February 10, 2017)Terms of ServiceDeveloper PoliciesYouTube API Services Terms of ServiceherehereYouTube’s Measurement Programwebsite

Improving the YouTube experience for users and creators. Every month, we update our app and site with dozens of new features for users and creators. We want to make sure that every application or website takes advantage of the latest and greatest YouTube functionalities. That’s why we’re introducing a Requirement of Minimum Functionality, which is designed to ensure users have a set of basic functionality around core parts of their YouTube experience, like video playback, comment management, video upload, and other services.

Strengthening user data and privacy. We want to help foster innovative products while giving users even more control around data privacy and security. These updated terms serve to strengthen our existing user controls and protections even further. For example, we now require developers to have a privacy policy that clearly explains to users what user info is accessed, collected and stored.

Fostering a healthy YouTube ecosystem. While we want to continue to encourage growth of our ecosystem, we also need to make sure our terms limit misuse. As the YouTube developer ecosystem evolved, we saw some fantastic uses of our API Services. Sadly, with amazing uses, there have also been a handful of applications that have misused our API Services. These updated terms serve to further protect against misuse and protect users, creators, and advertisers.

YouTube API Services Terms of ServiceDeveloper Policiesyt-api-tos-questions@google.com
Posted by Shalini GovilPai, Global Head of Technology Solutions

Google

Labels: youtube api

YouTube's road to HTTPS

Monday, August 1, 2016

HTTPS transparency report

HTTPS

Lots of traffic! Our CDN, the Google Global Cache, serves a massive amount of video, and migrating it all to HTTPS is no small feat. Luckily, hardware acceleration for AES is widespread, so we were able to encrypt virtually all video serving without adding machines. (Yes, HTTPS is fast now.)

Lots of devices! You watch YouTube videos on everything from flip phones to smart TVs. We A/B tested HTTPS on every device to ensure that users would not be negatively impacted. We found that HTTPS improved quality of experience on most clients: by ensuring content integrity, we virtually eliminated many types of streaming errors.

Lots of requests! Mixed content—any insecure request made in a secure context—poses a challenge for any large website or app. We get an alert when an insecure request is made from any of our clients and will block all mixed content using Content Security Policy on the web, App Transport Security on iOS, and uses CleartextTraffic on Android. Ads on YouTube have used HTTPS since 2014.