Smart Consumer Guides Studio
Privacy Policy
What this studio tool does with Google and YouTube data, which is confined to our own channel, and how that access is removed.
Este documento é publicado em inglês. Quando existir uma tradução, o texto inglês é o que prevalece.
The short version. Smart Consumer Guides Studio is an internal tool. It is not available to the public, it has no sign-in for anyone else, and it cannot be authorised by anybody but the NOVEMADE Google Account that owns the Smart Consumer Guides channel. It uses the YouTube Data API only to publish our own videos to that one channel and to read back their status. It receives no data about any other person, it stores no viewer information, and no Google user data is sold, shared, or used for advertising.
This policy describes Smart Consumer Guides Studio, the tool NOVEMADE uses to publish documentary videos to its own YouTube channel, Smart Consumer Guides. It is a separate document from the NOVEMADE website privacy policy, because the question it answers is a different one: not “what does this website do with my data”, but “what does this application do with Google user data”.
1. Who uses this application
One person: the holder of the NOVEMADE Google Account that owns the channel. The application runs on a studio workstation and is started from a command line by that person. There is no hosted version, no public URL, no account registration, and no mechanism by which a member of the public could grant it access to their Google Account. If you are reading this as a member of the public, this application holds nothing about you and never will.
2. What Google data it receives
Only data about our own channel and our own videos, returned by the YouTube Data API in answer to calls the tool makes about them. Specifically: the channel’s identifier, title, handle and video count, used to confirm that the authorised account is the right channel before anything is published; and the identifier, title, description, privacy status and upload status of videos we uploaded ourselves.
It does not request, receive or store viewer identities, comments, subscriber lists, watch history, demographic reports, or any data about a channel other than ours. It reaches no Google service other than YouTube.
3. The scopes it requests, and why
| OAuth scope | API calls it enables | Why the application needs it |
|---|---|---|
| youtube.upload | videos.insert (resumable upload) | To upload a finished documentary file to our own channel. This is the application’s primary purpose. |
| youtube.readonly | channels.list (mine=true), videos.list, playlistItems.list | To confirm, before any upload, that the authorised account is the intended channel; and afterwards to read back a video’s own processing and privacy status, so that a failed upload is never reported as a success. |
| youtube.force-ssl | videos.update, thumbnails.set | To set the thumbnail we produced, to correct a title or description on our own video, and to move a video of ours from private to public once a human has approved its release. videos.update is not covered by youtube.upload, which is the only reason this scope is requested. |
| yt-analytics.readonly | YouTube Analytics reports for our own channel | Read-only performance figures for our own videos, used to judge our own editorial decisions. Requested only when that reporting is enabled, and never used to read another channel. |
No other scope is requested. The application asks for the narrowest set that lets it publish and then verify its own uploads: it holds no scope that would let it read a viewer, manage another channel, or touch any Google service outside YouTube.
4. Where the credentials are kept
- The OAuth client file and the resulting token are stored as files in a secrets directory on one studio workstation, and nowhere else. They are not in version control: that directory, every *.token.json and every client_secret*.json are each separately excluded.
- They are never sent to a server of ours, because there is no server of ours. The only destination a token reaches is Google’s own token and API endpoints.
- They are never written to a log, a report or a printed line. The application has one function that reports on the stored token, and it returns whether a refresh token is present and when the file was written — never a value.
- The application’s own record of its API calls deliberately stores no access token, no authorisation header, no full URL, no resumable-session address and no request body. It keeps an operation name and a timestamp.
5. What is not done with it
- Google user data is never sold, rented or shared with a third party.
- It is never used for advertising, for building a profile, or for training a machine-learning model. No part of it is sent to any AI or language model: the tool’s text and image generation runs locally and is given scripts and research, never account data.
- It is never transferred to anyone else, except where we would be legally required to — which has not happened.
- It is never read by a human other than the account holder, and then only through the application’s own output.
Our use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.
The policies this application is bound by:
6. How long it is kept, and how to remove it
The token is kept while the channel is being published to, and deleted when it is no longer needed. Because the only authorising account is our own, revocation is entirely in our hands and needs no request from anybody: the access is removed on the Google Account permissions page, and the local token file is deleted. Either one stops the application immediately.
7. Changes and contact
If what the application does with Google data changes — a scope added, a new endpoint called — this page is updated before that change is used, and the date at the top reflects it. To ask a question about this document, write to info@novemade.com. It reaches a person directly.