Article writer here! Yeah it's really creepy. In the "Research" tab, youtube tells me what my viewers have been searching for - especially the searches that don't produce many results. Sometimes the search terms are very general (eg: javascript), and sometimes they're more specific (eg: how to [personally identifying task]).

It also shows me what my viewers favourite videos are. Again, the 'highest rated' ones are general. But as you look down the numbers, you can see more specific things.

Well. I was in the "analytics is mostly bad" camp anyways. But the things that you just told me are more of the "analytics are far worse than you think" kind. Like "how the hell aren't those people in jail right now"?

>Like "how the hell aren't those people in jail right now"?

Were you under the impression that things you typed in the search bar of YouTube (or Google or Facebook or...) were not tracked? What about this situation makes you believe someone should go to jail?

The reasonable assumption is that it’s tracked by YouTube and mostly relegated to server logs and automated analysis, not that the search queries will be displayed verbatim to the channel owners.

They don't filter out low-volume queries?? In AdWords search term report they would blank out any queries not searched by multiple different users which was enough to not leak anything personally identifiable..