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White House Exempts YouTube From Web Privacy Rules
An anonymous reader writes "The new White House website privacy policy promises that the site will not use long-term tracking cookies, complying with a decade old rule prohibiting such user tracking by federal agencies. However, Obama's legal team has quietly exempted YouTube from this rule. Visitors to the official White House blog will receive long-term tracking cookies whenever they surf to a web-page with an embedded YouTube video — even those users that do not click the "play" button. As CNET reports, no other company has been singled out and rewarded with such a waiver."
Yes, and the youtube TOS prohibits you from mirroring the videos or viewing them offline.
It's important for the government communications to be format/time shiftable so that we can pretend that we can hold them accountable to what they said in the past.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Is this what our government is wasting its time with? Monitoring what websites we browse even more? Is knowing what John and Jane Doe viewed on YouTube going to restore our economy or end the war? Shouldn't those be the priorities instead?
We are at war with two countries that we have no business being involved with. Our entire economy and capitalistic system is rapidly collapsing while rampant bailout spending is furthering the problems with no oversight whatsoever. Unemployment and homelessness are continually rising as are foreclosure rates. We have one of the worst education success rates and literacy rates of developed nations but we spend the most per capita of all developed countries on education. Global warming destroying our habitat and living space. Why isn't the federal government focusing 100% on those issues? Even a second of manpower wasted on monitoring YouTube usage by John Doe is a complete waste of federal resources.
I wonder how many people and lawyers and lobbyists where hired and used to make this one decision about tracking internet usage? A team of ten? Possibly fifty? How much did this one decision cost in terms of hours? How many billable hours are we talking on taxpayer burden? $500,000? $1,000,000 worth of taxpayer money?
The fact is that this is a colossal waste of public resources. The more time spent on anything but restructuring our economy and removing us from war, the closer we get to our complete collapse as a nation.
This is just a small example of how the federal government wastes its time. Congressional hearings for cheating in Major League Baseball? Check. Joe Biden and John McCain were major players in those hearings by the way. Seeing if video games can be banned from being sold if they are violent? Check. Hilary Clinton and Al & Tipper Gore have had that on their agenda for years. Instead of worrying about issues that matter our government hires teams of lawyers and technicians to track YouTube usage or investigate athletes or to stop GTA from being played.
this is significant is because Google's PAC was the fourth largest contributor to the Obama campaign. So, if anything else, it just shows that Obama is beholden to corporate interests just like every other president before him. No surprise there. On another note, I have my browser configured to delete all cookies when it is closed. This really ought to be the default on all browsers, as the only thing cookies have any use for (to you) is keeping track of your transactions when you're logged into a website. If they get deleted, all you have to do is log in again.