YouTube

Is YouTube safe?

For adults, YouTube is a fairly safe app. It runs on a Google account, which is one of the hardest consumer accounts to break into, and it has no private messaging where most grooming and sextortion starts. Its weak points are elsewhere: Google tracks your viewing to target ads, the recommendation feed can pull children towards harmful content, and scam ads use deepfaked celebrities. We score it 54/100, well ahead of TikTok (41) and Instagram (40).

What YouTube knows about you

YouTube's App Store label lists contact info and identifiers as used to track you across other companies' apps and websites. Linked to your identity are purchases, financial info, location, contact info, contacts, user content, search history, browsing history, identifiers, usage data, diagnostics and other data. Unlike Meta's apps, it does not list health or "sensitive" data.

Your watch and search history is the heart of it. It shapes recommendations and, by default, the ads you see across Google. The controls are better than most: you can pause history, set it to auto-delete, and turn off personalised ads in My Ad Center. Doing so makes ads less targeted, not fewer.

Children: the $170 million lesson and the 2026 trials

In September 2019 Google and YouTube paid $170 million, then the largest amount in a US children's privacy case, after the FTC and New York said YouTube collected cookies from viewers of child-directed channels without parental consent and sold ads against them. The complaint said YouTube had told one advertiser it had no users under 13. Since then, creators must mark videos made for kids, which turns off personalised ads and comments on them.

The legal focus has since moved from data to design:

• March 2026. A Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable for harm to a young woman, K.G.M., and awarded $6 million, the first verdict of its kind.
• June 2026. YouTube settled confidentially with a 15-year-old plaintiff before the second bellwether trial, without admitting liability.
• December 2025. Australia's minimum-age law took effect. YouTube had 325,000 accounts held by Australians aged 13 to 15, according to the eSafety Commissioner, and now signs out under-16s. YouTube argued the law would make children less safe, because logged-out teens lose filters and wellbeing reminders.

YouTube's own answer is age estimation. Since July 2025 it has used machine learning in the US to guess whether a signed-in user is under 18, whatever birthday they entered. Teens get no personalised ads, wellbeing reminders on and limits on repeated viewing of some kinds of videos.

Scams on YouTube

The scams you are most likely to see are ads and livestreams, not messages. Common patterns:

• Deepfaked videos of well-known business figures promoting crypto "giveaways" or trading platforms.
• Hijacked channels, renamed to look like a tech company, running fake livestreams with a QR code or wallet address.
• Comments impersonating a creator, asking you to contact them on Telegram or WhatsApp for a "prize".

The hijacked channels matter because they borrow trust. A channel with a long history and hundreds of thousands of subscribers looks safe, and that is exactly why criminals steal them. The usual route is malware sent to the creator as a fake sponsorship deal, which copies the browser's login cookies and bypasses two-step verificationTwo-factor authenticationSigning in with a second proof of identity on top of your password, such as a code from an app, a security key or a passkey.More in the glossary. Stolen channels are often renamed overnight.

No real creator or company will ask you to send crypto to receive more back. Report the ad or stream, and check a channel's name, subscriber history and verification badge before trusting it.

Settings worth changing

1. Secure your Google account with a passkeyPasskeyA way to sign in without a password. Your device holds a key tied to one website or app and unlocks it with your fingerprint, face or PIN.More in the glossary or two-step verificationTwo-factor authenticationSigning in with a second proof of identity on top of your password, such as a code from an app, a security key or a passkey.More in the glossary at myaccount.google.com, and run Google's Security Checkup.
2. Turn off or auto-delete watch and search history, and switch off personalised ads in My Ad Center.
3. For a child under 13, use YouTube Kids or a supervised account through Google Family Link, not a shared adult account.
4. Turn off autoplay for teenagers, and use Restricted Mode on shared devices.
5. Creators: never run "sponsorship" files or game demos sent by email; they are the usual way channels are stolen.

How we scored it

Security (72) and user control (70) are YouTube's strengths, thanks to Google's account protection and history controls. Privacy (35) reflects ad tracking based on viewing history. Scams and harmful content (45) and regulatory record (50) reflect the 2019 children's privacy penalty and the 2026 verdict. X scores lower on both counts.