Privacy Policy

YouTube tools: what they are

Outlier Feed, Competitors, Comment Ideas, Stats and Sponsor Intel are analytics tools our own team uses to plan content and sponsorships for our own YouTube channels (SML Universe, Gumball Universe, Rewatch TV and Spo0ky). They use YouTube API Services. By using them, authorized team members also agree to the YouTube Terms of Service; Google's handling of data is described in the Google Privacy Policy.

YouTube tools: what data they access and store

• Public YouTube data through the YouTube Data API: video titles, thumbnails, publish dates, durations, view/like/comment counts, channel names, subscriber counts and upload lists for channels in our niches, and the public comments on our own videos. Comment authors' display names are stored with their comments; no other information about commenters is collected or inferred.
• Sponsor Intel reads the public descriptions of videos on channels we track to find sponsor links. It stores the video's ID, title and publish date, the channel name, and the sponsor's link and domain; the descriptions themselves are read and not stored. Every tracked channel is fully re-read within 30 days, so nothing stored about a video outlives that without a refresh, and videos that have been removed drop out. Which links count as sponsors, the brand names, counts and rankings are our own detection, not YouTube data.
• Our own channels' analytics through the YouTube Analytics API, with the OAuth consent of the channel owner: views, watch time, revenue, traffic sources, retention and audience breakdowns. The OAuth tokens are stored server-side in an access-controlled Redis store (Upstash) and are never exposed to browsers or third parties.
• Sign-in: the tools are limited to team members we authorize, who sign in with Google. We store the signed-in account's email address and a session cookie, nothing else from the Google account.

Stored YouTube data lives in our database (Supabase) and Redis (Upstash) on servers in the United States. Titles, channel names, descriptions and comment text are refreshed from YouTube or deleted within 30 days. View, like, subscriber and comment counts are refreshed on the same schedule. Day-by-day view-count history is kept for 30 days, or for up to 36 months once our analytics use case is accepted under YouTube's additional policies for derived metrics and data storage, and is deleted after that. The multiples, rankings, breakout scores and niche tags the tools show are our own calculations from that data, are labelled as such on the pages, and are not YouTube figures.

YouTube tools: processors, sharing, and your choices

• Video titles may be translated, and comments on our own videos screened for content ideas, by Anthropic's Claude models. Anthropic does not train on API data and retains nothing beyond the request.
• No YouTube data is sold, rented, shared with advertisers, or used for advertising. The only parties that touch it are the processors that run the tools: Google (YouTube API Services), Vercel (hosting), Supabase (database), Upstash (Redis) and Anthropic (translation and screening).
• A channel owner who connected a channel can revoke our access at any time from Google's security settings at security.google.com/settings/security/permissions. We check our authorization regularly and delete data obtained under a revoked consent within 7 days. To request deletion of any data we hold about you or your channel, write to the address below; we delete it within 7 days. Deleting data we hold does not affect data stored by YouTube itself, which you manage on YouTube.

Universe AI: what it is

Universe AI is an internal accounting automation operated by Universe Productions, LLC ("we", "us"). It connects our own QuickBooks Online company to our own contractor records so that vendor profiles, contractor payments, and tax-form details stay accurate without manual typing. It is not offered to the public, is not listed on any app store, and connects to no QuickBooks company other than our own.

What data it touches

• From QuickBooks Online: vendor records, expense transactions, and account names, read and written through Intuit's official API using OAuth 2.0 with the accounting scope only.
• From our own records: our contractor roster (names, emails, roles, rates) and the tax forms (W-9 / W-8BEN) our contractors file with us, stored in our Google Drive.

Contractor tax identification numbers are written into QuickBooks and stored nowhere else. Our systems never log them, never persist them outside QuickBooks, and our own reports mask or omit them.

Where data lives and how it is protected

• The application runs on Vercel; all traffic uses TLS (HTTPS).
• Intuit OAuth tokens are stored server-side in an access-controlled Redis store (Upstash), encrypted in transit and at rest, and are never exposed to browsers or third parties. Refresh-token rotation is honoured on every refresh.
• API credentials and secrets live in environment configuration, never in source code.
• Tax documents are processed transiently by Anthropic's Claude API to transcribe the form's fields. Anthropic does not train on API data. Documents are not retained by us outside their original Google Drive location.

What we do not do

• We do not sell, rent, or share QuickBooks data or contractor data with anyone.
• We do not use the data for advertising or any purpose beyond the bookkeeping described above.
• No service providers receive it beyond the processors that run the system itself: Intuit (QuickBooks), Vercel (hosting), Upstash (token store), Google (Drive/Sheets), and Anthropic (document transcription).

Retention and disconnect

QuickBooks data lives in QuickBooks. Operational state we keep is limited to sync outcomes (what ran, when, and why something was skipped) and contains no tax identification numbers. Disconnecting the app from QuickBooks — or revoking its access from Intuit's side — stops all access immediately; stored tokens become invalid and are discarded.

Contact

Questions about this policy or our data practices: contactuniversehere@gmail.com.