YouTube users in the UAE are currently able to access the account pages and personal information of other people in what appears to be a data storage error, ArabianBusiness.com can reveal.
When signed in on their own accounts, UAE users are able to view the ‘My videos', ‘Contacts', ‘Favourites' and other menus belonging to other users.
UAE users can also see personal profiles and messages, and if account holders have linked their YouTube account to their Gmail account then UAE users can access this as well.
The issue only appears to be present with the Etisalat internet service, while users of the UAE's second internet service provider (ISP) Du, remain unaffected.
The issue has been replicated by the editorial teams of both itp.net and Windows Arabic magazine. As of Wednesday the problem had not been fixed.
In both tests the user accounts that were visible to UAE users were accounts that had been logged into only a few hours previously, suggesting that the index pages have been cached by Etisalat, and were somehow being accessed in error through the cache.
Cache is a temporary storage area where frequently accessed data can be stored for rapid access.
Neither Google, owner of YouTube, nor Etisalat were immediately available for comment.
The issue appears to be very similar to a problem which was reported by users of Kuwaiti ISP FASTtelco, who said that they were able to see other users' Gmail accounts and other personal details, although this was later denied by the ISP.
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