Privacy notice

plevel reads public comments on YouTube videos to find bot and scam accounts. If you have commented on a channel plevel monitors, this page says what is held about you, why, for how long, and how to have it deleted.

Who is responsible

Ondřej Praus, Czech Republic. Contact: ondrej@plevel.app. The supervisory authority is the Czech Office for Personal Data Protection, Úřad pro ochranu osobních údajů (ÚOOÚ), Prague.

What is processed, and where it comes from

Public comments on the videos of the YouTube channels plevel monitors, read through the YouTube Data API. Today those are a small number of channels I chose in order to develop the tool and offer it to their owners.

From each comment: its text, when it was posted or edited, its like count, and the commenting channel's ID. From the commenting channel's public profile: its display name, description, profile picture address, creation date, subscriber count and video count.

plevel derives from that: a spam score, the signals behind it, the coordinated campaign the account was grouped into, which monitored channels the account was seen on and when, when its comments or the account itself disappeared from YouTube, and a reviewer's verdict on the account if one was made.

On channels where plevel is a moderator, also a log of the comments it hid, or in a trial of automatic hiding would have hid: which comment, when, the score and rules at that moment, and whether the creator restored it.

Why, and on what basis

To find coordinated spam and scam accounts in a creator's comment sections so that the creator can act on them. The legal basis is legitimate interest (GDPR Art. 6(1)(f)): preventing fraud against creators and their viewers. No decision with a legal or similar effect is automated. A person looks at the evidence and decides on each account. On a channel whose owner has made plevel a moderator, that decision can be to hide the account's comments: YouTube holds them for review, the creator can restore them, and plevel deletes no comment.

How long

Raw data, meaning comment text, names, channel descriptions and picture addresses, is deleted 30 days after it was fetched, unless it was fetched again in the meantime. The hide log is deleted after 30 days. Kept longer, as plevel's own records: the score and the signals behind it (a signal can quote a single word from a comment, such as a disguised ticker or app name), the reviewer's verdict, which monitored channels the account was seen on, when and how often (channel IDs, dates and counts), the campaign it was grouped into, and when its comments or the account itself disappeared from YouTube or came back. All of it is removed on a deletion request, see below.

Who sees it

The creator whose channel it is, through a private review link that shows only their channel. Nobody else. Nothing is sold, shared, or used for advertising. Google is the source of the data, under YouTube's own terms. The tool runs on a server in Germany. This website is delivered by Cloudflare, which sees your IP address in order to deliver it; the site itself keeps nothing about your visit.

Your rights

You can ask what plevel holds about your channel, ask for it to be deleted, object to the processing, or ask for it to be restricted. You can also complain to the ÚOOÚ. Write to ondrej@plevel.app with your YouTube channel ID or handle.

Deletion. Everything plevel holds about the channel is deleted within 7 calendar days of your request. Backup copies age out within 14 days after that. Two things remain: your channel ID and the date of your request on a do-not-process list, so that plevel discards your comments and profile instead of storing them again, and, if the account had been marked as a bot in review, that bare mark (channel ID and date only, no text). Both exist only so that the deletion holds.

Proof. So that nobody can delete another person's record, I will send you a short code to put in your channel's description for a day. Once I see it there, I delete.

Objection is handled the same way: deletion plus the do-not-process list.

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