The YouTube videos you watch can be tracked

London March 16 (IANS) If you thought what you watch on YouTube is no one s business you could not be further detached from reality. Researchers have found that your online video viewing habits can be tracked.

Gaps in YouTube s encryption enable both government intelligence agencies hackers and internet marketers to determine which videos a user is watching said the researchers.

We built a simple yet robust machine-learning algorithm that can identify which video you watched -- within a predetermined set of videos -- with a high degree of accuracy said one of the researchers Ran Dubin from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) in Israel.

The algorithm is based on an in-depth study of how video services work how video content is encoded and how a video player requests information to play it Dubin said.

Dubin was able to use this algorithm to determine if someone had watched a specific video from a set of suspicious terror-related videos.

Intelligence agencies could access this technology for tracking terrorists or other suspicious individuals.

Internet marketing companies could track the number and make-up of viewers watching an ad according to the research presented at the Black Hat Europe meeting in London.

It s important to know that video encryption is not as secure as we once thought Dubin said

Google YouTube s parent company is not likely to patch the gaps since it would be prohibitively expensive to create a traffic obfuscation mechanism for every user s every video request he added.

--IANS
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