How Channel IQ handles your data

Channel IQ is a private tool that Studio Kiku built for its own YouTube channel. It is not a public service: only Studio Kiku's owner can sign in, and the data described here is shown to nobody else.

YouTube API Services

Channel IQ uses YouTube API Services to read channel and video information. By using Channel IQ you agree to be bound by the YouTube Terms of Service. Google's handling of data is described in the Google Privacy Policy.

What Channel IQ stores

Your connected channel. Its id, title, handle and uploads playlist, plus the date it was connected. The title, handle and uploads playlist are read again every day; any of them not refreshed for 30 days is cleared, the copy of the title kept with the connection included.
Google sign-in tokens. When you connect a channel, Google issues a refresh token and short-lived access tokens. Channel IQ stores them encrypted (AES-256-GCM) and uses them only to read your channel's data. It asks for read-only access: viewing your YouTube account and viewing your YouTube Analytics reports. It cannot upload, edit or delete anything on YouTube.
The list of your uploads. For each video: its id, title, publish time, length, privacy status, thumbnail URL and whether YouTube reports it as a Short, a long-form video or a live stream. Read with your authorization and refreshed every day; a video's title, thumbnail, publish time, length and privacy status not refreshed for 30 days are cleared.
Your channel's daily analytics. From the YouTube Analytics API, per video and per channel, for every day since your first upload: views, engaged views, watch time, average view duration and percentage viewed, subscribers gained and lost, likes, dislikes, comments and shares.
Traffic sources and search terms. Where your views came from, by day, for the channel and each video, and the monthly top YouTube search terms that led to your videos.
Audience retention. For each video, the curve of how much of the audience is still watching at each point, read daily while a video is under 30 days old and every 30 days after.
Hourly public view counts of new uploads. The view, like and comment counts of each of your uploads under 72 hours old, read every hour under your authorization.
The YouTube Reporting API reports. The daily reports YouTube prepares for your channel (including thumbnail impressions and click-through), stored as delivered and read into the figures above.
Channel IQ's own calculations from that data. Each video's totals for its first 24 hours, 48 hours, 7, 30, 90 and 365 days, the comparisons with your earlier videos, and the lines that point out a pattern. They are labelled as Channel IQ's calculations, never as YouTube's numbers.
Your channel's public counts. Subscribers as rounded by YouTube, total views and video count, read once a day. While your channel is connected they are read under your authorization: those are kept while the connection stands and deleted with it. When there is no connection to read them with, they are read with an API key the way any public channel's counts are read, and kept for no more than 30 days.
Public information about other channels. For channels Channel IQ follows or suggests: the channel's title, handle and public counts (subscribers as rounded by YouTube, total views, video count), and for their videos the title, publish time, length, category, thumbnail URL and public view, like and comment counts (counts only, never comment text), plus where discovery saw a channel (the search and the video). Read with an API key, never with your authorization. Under YouTube's policies the counts, and Channel IQ's calculations from them, are kept for no more than 30 days (36 months only if YouTube accepts Channel IQ under its Section L terms); titles, handles and the rest of the text are cleared or deleted after 30 days without a refresh either way, and a title a video replaced is kept no more than 30 days from when it was last read.
Research. The topics you choose and your subject list; which of your videos and of other channels' stored videos are about each topic; keyword measurements (from your own search terms, and from YouTube's public search results read with an API key: a result count and whether your video is among them; the public views of the top results only under Section L, since their median brings different channels' views together); Channel IQ's opportunity scores; and its recommendations, each with the evidence and the prediction it rested on. Measurements and scores built on other channels' public data are kept for no more than 30 days (36 months only under Section L), counted from the oldest public reading they rest on, and a link to another channel's video goes with that video's title. Recommendations keep other channels' data only as a reference that disappears with the data it points to. Other channels' titles go to the AI for topic tagging only under Section L.
AI. When an AI key is set, Channel IQ sends Anthropic (the AI provider) the stored evidence a brief or a tag needs: your channel's figures and titles, and the stored public ids and counts of other channels' videos, and their titles for a brief (and, under Section L only, for topic tagging). It never sends tokens, keys or anything about a viewer. What the AI writes is kept as Channel IQ's interpretation, labelled as such and kept apart from YouTube's numbers; a brief written from other channels' public numbers loses its text on the same 30-day clock. Each AI call is logged with its token counts and cost.
The assistant. Your conversations: each question you ask (your own words, kept until you delete the conversation) and each answer: a short summary and its claims, each labelled as a YouTube metric, a Channel IQ calculation, an estimate, an AI interpretation or a recommendation, with what it rests on (ids, metric names, periods and capture times), the stored data the assistant read to write it, and the provider, model, tokens and cost. With each question it keeps a one-way fingerprint of it (the conversation and the words), so the same question sent again within a minute, or while its answer is still being written, is answered once; the fingerprint goes when the conversation is deleted. To answer, it sends the AI provider you choose in Settings (Anthropic, or OpenAI once a key is added) your question, the earlier answers in the conversation and the stored data it read (your channel's figures and titles, other channels' public figures and titles), never tokens, keys or anything about a viewer. An answer built on your channel's data is deleted with the authorization like the rest; one built on other channels' public numbers loses its text on their clock (30 days, 36 months only under Section L); one that showed another channel's title loses its text 30 days after that title was read; and one that described one of your videos loses its text when that video is removed, retitled or not refreshed for 30 days. The question and the cost record stay. Deleting a conversation deletes its messages at once. The assistant only reads: it never writes to YouTube, sends email or changes anything outside Channel IQ.
Learning. Channel IQ checks its own recommendations against what happened and looks for patterns in your videos. It stores, for each recommendation whose measurement period has ended, an evaluation: which of your videos on the topic it measured, that video's engaged views over its first 7 and 30 days, the error against the prediction and the verdict (hit, miss or inconclusive), with the ids and capture times of the rows it read. It stores findings about your own videos (for example, that videos with a number in the title had more engaged views in their first week), each with its statistics and the ids of the videos behind it, never a title. It keeps a log of each run (ids, counts and dates), and the versions of its scoring (the weights, each change's test and the reason; the test's figures, which are computed from your channel's results, go with the authorization, and the weights, the dates and the reason stay). Nothing in it uses another channel's numbers. Once a week, only when an AI key is set and there is enough evidence to test it, it sends Anthropic the first five of your evaluated recommendations and the findings that rest on none of the others (no title of any channel) for at most three proposed changes to the scoring, under $1 a month; a proposal changes nothing unless it passes the same test on recommendations it was not shown.
Website analytics of studiokiku.com (Google Analytics 4). For the Studio Kiku page, Channel IQ reads studiokiku.com's own Google Analytics 4 reports with a read-only service account and stores, per day, the number of sessions, engaged sessions and key events (such as a quote request), grouped by where Google Analytics says each visit came from (source, medium, channel group and campaign) and by whether it began on a podcast page, plus the website's daily totals. These are aggregate counts: no visitor, address, device or other personal detail is asked for or stored, and nothing from the booking pages Jane hosts. This is not YouTube data and is never combined with YouTube data. It is kept until it is deleted by hand (no automatic deletion), and disconnecting YouTube does not delete it.
A request log. For each request to Google: when it ran, what it asked for, whether it worked, the quota it used and any error. It never records tokens, keys or the contents of a response.

Channel IQ stores no information about your viewers as individuals, no comment text (of any channel), and no client information. It does not sell or share data, and it uses no advertising or third-party tracking scripts.

While the connection stands, a video's title, thumbnail, publish time, length and privacy status not refreshed for 30 days are cleared, and a video that is gone from your channel is marked removed. When the authorization goes, the record of the connection keeps only its ids and dates: the channel name it was given is deleted with the rest.

How to remove access

In Channel IQ: Settings, then Disconnect. Channel IQ revokes its access at Google and deletes the stored tokens straight away. Everything Channel IQ read under your authorization, and the calculations made from it (every item above except the public counts read with an API key, the website analytics and the request log), is deleted within 7 days of a disconnect.
At Google: open security.google.com/settings/security/permissions and remove Channel IQ. Channel IQ then deletes everything it read under your authorization, and the calculations made from it, within 30 days.

After either, the research records keep only the topics and keywords you chose, each recommendation's date, topic, confidence, status and references, and the AI cost records; every value computed from your channel's data goes with the authorization. The assistant keeps your questions and, for an answer built on your channel's data, only its references, provider, model and cost. The learning engine's evaluations that read your channel's data, all of its findings, the AI's proposals and the figures of every scoring test go with the authorization; its run log (ids, counts and dates) and its scoring versions (the weights, the dates and the reasons) hold no YouTube data and stay, and a recommendation whose figures were deleted is then recorded as inconclusive.

Back to sign in