Make use of your own data (Or how to find your most loved Youtube video of all times)
TLDR: Upload the google takeout watch-history.html here: https://adyz.github.io/youtube-parse-history/
Google, Facebook, Youtube and so many more apps/services that we use daily are storing everything that we do with these services (time, place, duration, scope, etc).
With the GDPR closing up, we should be able to take our data back, but what can we do with it?
I think I will make a series on how I use my downloaded data from these services to make my life better, but for starters, I will show you how I use my Youtube data to find my most viewed videos from Youtube.
How?
If you have a google account for a long time, go to https://takeout.google.com and download your archive (make sure you have Youtube selected).
Unzip the archive and go to the youtube/history folder and open the watch-history.html file (based on your preferred language the filename might differ).
If you open that file in a browser, you’ll find all of your youtube watch history.
Yes, they’ve been watching you too!
Not very useful in this format, but I’ve created a script that will parse this file and give you a list sorted by the number of views (number of times that video is listed in the original list)
To use this script, go to: https://adyz.github.io/youtube-parse-history/ and upload your html file here.
It’s just client-side code so you don’t need to worry that I’ll take your data one more time. Don’t believe me, checkout the source: https://github.com/adyz/youtube-parse-history
P.S.
If you can download your data, hackers can too, so make sure you create secure passwords, two-factor authentication and don’t trust any service with your sensitive information.
