Slashdot Mirror
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."
... unless they legislate them to remove those cookies. What alternatives to YouTube could they use?
There's no place like localhost
A cookie to the youtube.com domain? Who cares.
What exactly are we losing by having this? If you're loading anything from youtube, then youtube could certainly log that fact permanently on their end.
Why is this news?
The U.S. government should have its own video servers, or lease them from YouTube, and not depend on commercial sites. Commercial sites can do anything they want any time they want; they don't have to consider internal government policy.
THIS IS THE MOST SIGNIFICANT NEWS ITEM OF THE DAY AND UNDERMINES OUR DEMOCRACY!
Obama is evil because his staff allowed You Tube to set a cookie. There's a conspiracy. They've gotten to him, he's in the bag for them. I bet he got use of the orbital mind control lasers in exchange for this.
Jesus christ, what the fuck? YouTube gets to set a cookie on the page. Is that really a huge deal? Now they know you watched the Inauguration video from the White House website! Oh noes!
Other gov sites broadcast video just fine without using cookies: http://www.america.gov/multimedia/video.html?videoId=8789243001
Why can't whitehouse.gov?
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.
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.
Hum.... nuked bananas.... <drool> /Homer
A third party host - YouTube - is allowed to keep tracking cookies. The federal regulation on tracking cookies applies only to federal websites, so that's not really a problem.
People seem suspicious that only YouTube was granted this exemption, but... are there any other third-party hosts that have things embedded in the whitehouse.gov website? If not, I still don't understand the problem here. YouTube is doing the tracking, not the feds. If the concern is over the ability of the feds to get that tracking data, then there are so many other ways they could do that it's not even worth getting butthurt over.
Sounds like this guy is just picking a nit.
=Smidge=
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.
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.
> 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.
Hmm... naked Bananarama... /me
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.
The way government is run, it'll cost a minimum of $500,000 a year to run it's own.
Or... $0 a year.
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.
I said that YouTube was a bad idea early on, because of the discrepancies between YouTube's policies and the policies surrounding government content. You cannot save YouTube videos on your hard drive without violating their TOS. This is another example of the discrepancy. Disturbingly, this administration is not pushing YouTube to modify their policies for the White House channel.
Palm trees and 8
>>>So why do they need a special exemption?
They don't. The slashdot summary is incorrect. As you stated, the video is not formally part of whitehouse.gov, but an external link to youtube.com and therefore the rules of youtube.com apply. It's perfectly logical.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
Huh... the way you phrase it, it doesn't sound news-worthy.
No, what I would expect is whitehouse.gov to not use youtube, instead of re-writing policy to allow Google to better track visitors to the whitehouse.gov site.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Well, that's probably why his version didn't make the summary.
Mr. Period: Nine is the one that's right by ten!
Nine: One day I will kill him. Then, I will be Ten.