By Magic Actions -Updated: Friday, October 6, 2023. YouTube is a video sharing platform that allows you to watch other people's videos, search for content, and upload your own videos. The service does not even require you to create an account and you can search and view any video anonymously on the website by simply turning off the search and watch history.
However, if you want to upload videos for others to watch, create playlists, leave comments, "like" or "dislike" a video, save your favorite videos to watch later and subscribe to YouTube channels, then you will have to sign up for YouTube using your Google account.
In this case, properly configuring the privacy settings for your YouTube profile is vital to protecting yourself and your privacy and security on YouTube.
If you'd like to keep your YouTube activity private, you can do that by selecting these options on the privacy settings page: "Keep all my saved playlists private" and "Keep all my subscriptions private."
1. Keep YouTube Private
All your watched or searched videos are stored in your account history. It's useful in many cases, but if you don't want YouTube to track what you've watched or searched, you can control your history by pausing or deleting it.
2. Manage Your History
If you want to download your YouTube activity data before deleting or pausing it, you can do that from your YouTube dashboard page, which you can find by clicking your channel icon, then "Your data in YouTube."
If you don't want your video to be viewed, shared, or searched by anyone on YouTube, then you can change your video's privacy settings to Private or Unlisted.
3. Change Video's Privacy
Private videos are only visible to you and the people whom you invite. Unlisted videos can be visible to and shared by anyone who has the video link. Private and Unlisted videos will not appear in search results, suggestions, subscriber feeds, your channel list, etc.
The privacy settings of your playlists, as well as the privacy settings of your videos can be changed from the default Public settings to Private or Unlisted.
4. Change Playlist's Privacy
By clicking the button above, you will go directly to your uploaded playlists page. Click the "Edit" button next to the playlist for which you want to change privacy settings, then simply select Private or Unlisted from the drop-down menu under the playlist thumbnail.
YouTube allows you to share your videos with a very wide audience, and sometimes people leave comments or messages that you do not want to have displayed on your videos.
5. Comments Options
Adjust your "Community" settings so that you can control comments, video responses, and live chat messages. This will help you prevent the publication of inappropriate comments. At the bottom left of the page, click Settings → Community → Defaults tab.
To prevent malicious users from manipulating your account and protect your privacy and security on YouTube, carefully and regularly check your subscription list.
6. Manage Subscriptions
If you find channels that you don't remember subscribing to, just unsubscribe. In addition, periodically check the list of third-party apps and linked accounts that have access to your Google account, and remove or unlink an app if it has no real reason to access your account.
YouTube is an amazing social community with tons of great videos. However, since anyone can upload a video, leave a comment, etc., you may be faced with something hateful or abusive.
7. Report Abuse
If someone is violating your privacy, harassing you, spamming, etc., you can report it on the YouTube Legal Policies page by clicking the button above.
