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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."

6 of 235 comments (clear)

  1. Re:This is disturbing... by tixxit · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The article is referring to whitehouse.gov's privacy policy. The only web site this affects is whitehouse.gov and the only users are the visitors to whitehouse.gov.

  2. Re:Who cares? by grantek · · Score: 3, Interesting

    One thing I didn't see in that paragraph is the fact that you can track a laptop geographically, ie. a user has been visiting the White House page from Iraq and is now showing up from an IP in the US.

  3. Re:The U.S. government should have its own servers by Tanktalus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    To me, it kinda works both ways. On one hand, you don't want to be dependant on YouTube. On the other hand, you don't want the government to be able to replace a video with another and claim that it always was this way. "We never said that... see our video?" When it's self-hosted, it's too easy to change. When it's YouTube-hosted, it's easy for YouTube to prove the change (and they may still have the old version, who knows). This is good for government transparency.

    I would agree that there needs to be a public discussion about pros and cons, but thus far it doesn't seem cut and dried that YouTube hosting government videos is entirely a bad thing. Or entirely a good thing, either.

    -- not an Obama supporter.

  4. Re:So um by blueg3 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Yes -- it seems that YouTube is the only one granted this exception because they're the only third-party embedded content.

    Incidentally, I was actually somewhat surprised when I went to whitehouse.gov to discover that it didn't use any third-party JavaScript and worked just fine with JavaScript disabled.

  5. Re:The U.S. government should have its own servers by _Sprocket_ · · Score: 4, Interesting

    My initial reaction was the same. But then it dawns on me that the new Administration is using YouTube like any other agent of the Press. Do we demand that the US Goverment set up its own TV stations and newspapers? No. The President announces a press conference and lets the media do their own thing. Occasionally, he does an interview with a specific host of a specific show to convey some particular message. YouTube is simply a recent take on a very old idea.

  6. Re:One more reason for them to not use YouTube by anaesthetica · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Disturbingly, this administration is not pushing YouTube to modify their policies for the White House channel.

    FTFA: "In just the past couple weeks, YouTube has launched dedicated pages for both the House and Senate to show off their own videos, and the site also recently started allowing users to directly download copies of some videos. This latter feature has not yet been widely deployed across the site, and is seems to be limited to videos posted by Obama's team."

    So there may in fact be some push from the White House to modify YouTube's policies. We'll see.

    --
    The Rise and Fall of Online Community