Terry said:
What exactly does granting permission to YouTube to use your mic and
cam enable them to do?
How are they currently using this feature?
My mind reading device seems to be broken so I can't quite reach into the
minds of the owners of google or those of the founders of youtube, but as
youtube are owned by google and google are this week's incarnation of the
debbil, we can only assume they're up to something very evil indeed. I
suggest using extra material when making your next tin-foil hat, to make it
double-thickness and all.
Alternatively, maybe you've actually just opened up the *adobe flash*
configuration, where this option is available for applications that *might*
use it for some reason. YouTube, of course, use flash to provide those
movies in a nice easy to watch low quality format that works with
everything.
So of course this would mean that they have access to do whatever you allow
flash to do on your system. But you allowing flash to do something, and
YouTube just happening to use flash like most of all the internet does these
days is subtly different from youtube themselves actually using your
microphone and camera.