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White House Exempts YouTube From Web Privacy Rules

Posted by timothy on from the but-other-than-this-one-thing dept.

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."

7 of 235 comments (clear)

  1. Other sites comply just fine by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Other gov sites broadcast video just fine without using cookies: http://www.america.gov/multimedia/video.html?videoId=8789243001

    Why can't whitehouse.gov?

  2. Re:This is disturbing... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:Who cares? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Read this.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie#Privacy_and_third-party_cookies

  4. full of sound and fury; signifying nothing... by Chyeld · · Score: 5, Informative

    For videos that are visible on WhiteHouse.gov, a 'persistent cookie' is set by third party providers when you click to play a video. (We may experience some engineering difficulties as the new Whitehouse.gov is posted and reviewed. We intend, however, to fully enforce the above provisions as soon as possible. If you are experiencing any difficulties, please contact us.)

    This persistent cookie is used by YouTube to help maintain the integrity of video statistics. A waiver has been issued by the White House Counsel's office to allow for the use of this persistent cookie.

    If you would like to view a video without the use of persistent cookies, a link to download the video file is typically provided just below the video.

    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.

  5. Re:They can't control external websites by neokushan · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  6. If you don't want cookies block the damn things. by John+Hasler · · Score: 4, Informative

    > 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.
  7. Re:They can't control external websites by Urza9814 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.