A controversial new web service, YouTube-Tools, is offering AI-generated background reports on YouTube users based solely on their public comments. For $20 a month, anyone with an email address and credit card can use the platform to infer details such as a user’s location, language, interests, and even cultural or political leanings.

Figure 1.AI Tool ‘YouTube-Tools’.

The tool works by scraping YouTube comment data—reportedly up to 20 billion comments from 1.4 billion users—and analysing it with a custom AI model built on technology from French startup Mistral. Within seconds, it generates a written profile summarizing a user’s potential region, behavioural traits, and online habits. Figure 1 shows the AI Tool ‘YouTube-Tools’.

This isn’t the first project from the developer, who has previously launched similar OSINT-style tools, including services for tracking usernames and chat histories across platforms like League of Legends, nHentai, Kick, and Twitch. While the developer claims these tools are designed for use by law enforcement, journalists, and private investigators, registration is quick and unrestricted, requiring no license verification. Although the site claims to use a “targeted KYC” (Know Your Customer) process and restricts access to licensed professionals, in practice, anyone can begin using the tool almost immediately.

The developer, who says they are based in Europe and have a background in open-source intelligence, also claims their tools are already in use by law enforcement in countries like Portugal and Belgium [1]. They say they revoke access when the service is used improperly, but one cited example of abuse was merely identifying a temporary email address—raising questions about how misuse is actually defined.

YouTube’s policies explicitly ban unauthorized scraping. The platform allows scraping only by public search engines that follow its robots.txt file or receive written permission. Whether YouTube is aware of or taking action against YouTube-Tools is currently unclear, as the company hasn’t commented.

The AI-generated summaries are a unique feature of YouTube-Tools and aim to simplify the manual process of reviewing a user’s comment history. In one example, the tool linked a user to Italy based on language and cultural references, though it avoided drawing direct political conclusions.

However, experts are warning that tools like this toe a dangerous line between analysing public data and engaging in invasive digital profiling. The large-scale ability to scrape, catalog, and draw personal inferences from online activity—especially without oversight—presents serious privacy concerns. Researchers have noted that some harassment-focused online communities are already experimenting with the developer’s other tracking tools.

As similar services, like the now-defunct Discord scraper Spy Pet, have already been banned, YouTube-Tools highlights the growing conflict between publicly available online information and individual privacy. While YouTube comments may be public, users rarely anticipate that their words could become the basis for automated behavioral analysis.

In a digital world where data aggregation increasingly resembles surveillance, the question isn’t whether your information is accessible—it’s who is compiling it, and to what end.

References

1. https://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2025/05/ai-tool-youtube-tools-scrapes-comments.html

Cite this article:

Keerthana S (2025), AI Tool ‘YouTube-Tools’ Analyzes Comments to Profile Users, Sparking Privacy Concerns, AnaTechMaz, pp.691