Does a YouTube tool need access to your channel?

You find a tool that writes your titles and descriptions, and the first thing it asks is to connect your YouTube channel. That is a reasonable moment to stop and ask what you are handing over, and the answer is more than most people expect.

What connecting your channel actually grants

"Connect your channel" means granting an OAuth scope, and Google documents exactly what each one permits. The one most commonly requested, youtube.force-ssl, is described by Google as permission to see, edit and permanently delete your videos, ratings, comments and captions.

Not read them. Delete them. Others in that same list allow managing your account, uploading on your behalf, and viewing your channel's private information. These are not exotic permissions, they are the ordinary ones, and a consent screen shows them in one line that is easy to click past.

What packaged does

Nothing. There is no YouTube login anywhere in it, no YouTube API client, and no OAuth scope requested from any provider. It cannot read your channel, publish to it, edit anything on it or delete anything from it, and that is not a policy we could quietly change our minds about. It is what the software is.

You paste a transcript. You copy the blocks. You paste them into YouTube Studio yourself, which means you see every word before it is published. That is the whole relationship.

We check it rather than promise it. A script in our build asserts three things on every release: no YouTube host in the shipped code, no YouTube API client, and no OAuth scope requested. If any of those stopped being true, the build would fail before it could ship.

The one exception, stated because omitting it would be dishonest

If you paste your own links into your description, we fetch those pages to read their titles, so the call to action we write says something sensible instead of pasting a bare URL. Those are addresses you chose and typed. It is still a request leaving our servers, so it belongs on this page.

The accurate sentence is no access to your channel, and it is never "we never contact anything".

How to check any tool yourself

• —Read the Google consent screen instead of clicking through it. It lists the permissions in plain words. "Manage your YouTube account" and "delete your videos" are not the same request.
• —Ask what the job needs. A tool that writes text for you to paste has no reason to hold the keys to your channel.
• —Check what you can revoke, and how. Google lists every app you have connected in your account settings, and access you granted can be taken back there.
• —Be more careful with access than with money. A bad subscription costs you a month. Delete permission on a channel you spent years building is a different order of mistake.

What this page does not claim

• —Not that tools requesting access are unsafe. Many need what they ask for. The point is to read the request, not to refuse all of them.
• —Not that our check proves more than it does. It reads our own source code, so it establishes that our code contains no YouTube destination, client or scope. It is not a live network trace of every dependency.
• —Not that we never make a request on your behalf. We fetch the title of a link you paste, and that is written above rather than buried here.