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
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.
To be fair, I voted for Obama because his campaign here in Oklahoma promised me cookies would follow if he became President. I guess this is close... I was kind of hoping for chocolate chip.
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
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=
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.
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.
You think that's bad??? I'm still waiting for my CHANGE!!!
I don't believe in karma, I just call it like I see it.
>>>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
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.
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