Porn videos secretly hidden on YouTube as pirates bypass Google's sexual content controls

A simple trick allows people to use Google's hosting services without being checked by them

Internet personalities Veronica Merrell (L) and Vanessa Merrell attend the 6th annual Streamy Awards hosted by King Bach and live streamed on YouTube at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on October 4, 2016 in Beverly Hills, California (Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for dick clark productions)

Pornographic videos are secretly being hidden on YouTube.

Pirates are using the site's video hosting services to host adult videos. And there appear to be very little that Google, which owns YouTube, can do about it.

YouTube has rules banning both sexual content and pirated videos, meaning that none of the videos should be available on the site. But many pirates have found a way around that restriction, meainng that they are able to use Google's reliable hosting services without having them taken down, reports TorrentFreak.

Ordinarily, YouTube has a series of controls meant to banish such content. First among them is its Content-ID software, which scans videos and compares it with others to work out whether it includes copyrighted content, but it also uses reports of abuse from users and staff to find out problem videos.

But pirates are able to get around that by uploading video and not publicly listing it, which means that they can embed it on their own site. That means that it gets served to users straight from Google, but won't be seen on YouTube or by the company's Content-ID system or administrators.

Since the videos can still be embedded into external sites, pirates and others are still able to host them on their own pages and get the traffic and ad revenue from doing so. But they do not have to pay for the video hosting and can use YouTube's reliable servces.

The trick is not only being used to host pornographic video but a whole range of content that wouldn't normally be allowed on the site. That includes other kinds of pirated footage, for instance.

YouTube does tend to take the content down once it has been found, usually by the owners of those videos. But because they are hidden they tend not to be noticed as quickly and YouTube is slower at removing them, according to companies that have issued complaints.

Google's public transparency report shows that it receives tens of thousands of complaints about people using the GoogleVideo.com domain, which is how the pirated YouTube videos show up to users.