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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."
Other gov sites broadcast video just fine without using cookies: http://www.america.gov/multimedia/video.html?videoId=8789243001
Why can't whitehouse.gov?
Why is it disturbing? Do you even understand what the policy is stating? It in no way affects how YouTube/Google have been able to use tracking cookies since day 1. The policy is referring to how the whitehouse.gov domain uses cookies. Since there are YouTube videos embedded on the site, and since the White House domain administrators don't have access to the YouTube cookies that get set, they are exempting them from this policy.
Read this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie#Privacy_and_third-party_cookies
More like "time for frist psot pissing contest!".
The state you are in while your HEAD is detached... - wait, what?
It's because YouTube hosts the videos, not the White House site. And the White House has no viable way to make YouTube not use tracking cookies on the content it serves up depending on the site the videos were embedded on. So they have a choice: allow YouTube to set it's normal cookies even when the videos are embedded in pages on the White House site, or never use YouTube for videos in the blog.
This isn't political. It's not about the White House, or the Democrafts, or the Republicans. It's about how YouTube tracks it's users. All users, all sites/blogs/whatever that drop YouTube videos into their pages.
Interestingly, if you go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qN1S1LdkUeg you'll see that there is a "click to download" option. As far as I can see, all of this account's videos are downloadable.
In other words, "When we link to a third party, non government owned, website to host videos, they will set their own tracking cookie as per their own policy. We've checked with our lawyers, they say this is OK and written a waiver to that effect. But just in case you don't want the cookie, we also include links to the videos to accomidate you."
What a non-story story.
The rule applies to federal agencies. Last I checked, youtube wasn't a federal agency, so it's not really much of a story. Slow news day?
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
> 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.
Unless, of course, they choose not to accept the cookies, in which case they don't receive them. The videos still work fine.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
No point in reinventing the wheel. YouTube is the thing for videos right now, so why not use it? People who keep sniping about gov't waste should be happy about this stuff.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
It states clearly and explicitly in their own privacy statement that Youtube is exempt from the tracker cookie issue and the reason why.
we really are scraping the barrel when a news story can be summed up by event + adverb = conspiracy.
Just wanted to say that I gotta agree with you there. I didn't, but then they got YouTube to add a download option for their videos. You can play them in your browser with fairly standard tech (Even Linux has pretty good flash support now - I know, I use it. It's buggy at times, but YouTube always works fine) and you can download it in MPEG format if it won't play. Works for me.
But google was such a substantial donor!
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. -- George Orwell
Just like microsoft ... and look ... the first proprietary inauguration in the history of the nation.
Obviously, were this Bush, we would have pointed out that the president of the US can now go to his campaign donors and ask them who looked at what section of the whitehouse.gov site.
Since he's going to spend over a trillion dollars which will have no effect whatsoever on the economy, this will come in very handy.
But it's the "messiah", so it's all just perfectly normal. As if the whitehouse is not capable of hosting it's own videos WITHOUT tracking ...