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Are the Google API permissions thoroughly documented anywhere? For example, what does the permission youtube.readonly actually mean? I see the rough title in English as “View your YouTube account”, but that’s too vague and generally broad to be of much use.

I’m not interested in opinions or interpretations on this question, or cursory summaries, only official and thorough documentation from Google. (e.g. https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/guides/authentication is hopelessly incomplete, and doesn't cut it.)

danorton
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For OAuth 2.0 scopes, you can find them in the documentation. Generally, they will be with their respective reference material under Authentication. For the youtube.readonly scope, you can find it here. If that isn't enough, you can also use the OAuth 2.0 Playground to find out which method calls you can make for a given scope. Simply pass in the scope, exchange tokens, and then get the list of possible operations.

Andy
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  • Thanks, but is that it? That's from where I got that `youtube.readonly` means “View your YouTube account”, which isn’t particularly descriptive. I changed the title of my question to stress that I'm looking for thorough documentation, not the cursory summary I’ve found. – danorton Sep 16 '14 at 02:19
  • Unfortunately, I believe that is it for official documentation. Scopes just broadly define what you have permission to do. I think if you look at what method calls you can make with a given scope, that will help give you a better idea of what you are capable of doing. Apologies if that doesn't help much. – Andy Sep 16 '14 at 23:19
  • Thanks. The underlying question is as an authoritative reference for end users. If an app demands certain permissions, it seems that there should be an authoritative reference that is understandable to an end user. Additionally, I could poke and probe and hack a non-authoritative answer empirically, but, as the permission isn’t thoroughly defined, the results could change. – danorton Sep 17 '14 at 19:34