by Pieter Arrntz at Malwarebytes Labs
Federal US authorities have asked Google for the names, addresses, telephone numbers, and user activity of accounts that watched certain YouTube videos, according to unsealed court documents Forbes has seen.
Of those users that weren’t logged in when they watched those videos between January 1 and 8, 2023, the authorities asked for the IP addresses.
The starting point of one of the investigations is an entity that uses the handle “elonmuskwhm” and is suspected of money laundering by selling Bitcoin for cash. As part of the investigation, agents sent the suspect links to tutorials on YouTube about mapping via drones and augmented reality software.Then they asked YouTube to send them data about the people that watched that video.
But those video tutorials were not private and had been watched over 30,000 times by the time the agents asked YouTube’s parent company Google for information about the viewers.
In another case,…
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