Recently, it became known that US courts were ordering YouTube (Google) to provide user information – a form of draconian investigation that has never been reported before. Additional details about this practice are emerging today.

Forbes revealed the matter last month after seeing documents showing a court ruling affected all YouTube users who watched certain videos in a given period. The personal data requested by law enforcement agencies in these cases was very detailed.

For Google users, this is information from their Google accounts (name, address, phone number and records, online payment history, IP address, etc.), while all others People visiting the URLs listed in the order had their IP addresses returned.

A year-long publication ban allowed Google to ensure none of this was made public, and now we're hearing about it because that deadline has expired.

However, the documents on which the original article was based were not published at the time; today, reports indicate that they have been made available on the Bluesky platform.

The order covers the first eight days of 2023 and three YouTube videos that are apparently obscure and innocuous in themselves (the target of the investigation was a person suspected of illegal activity, while the URLs of the videos were "swapped") during communication between undercover investigators and their target).

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