Slashdot Mirror
White House Ditches YouTube
An anonymous reader writes to tell us that in an apparent response to privacy complaints, the White House has quietly moved off of YouTube as a method for serving the President's weekly video address. Choosing instead to use a Flash-based solution and Akamai's content delivery network, this comes just days after YouTube began to roll out their own new policies regarding privacy of visitors.
Wise choice.
I never understood why they would choose YouTube over other Internet "channels". It is not exactly a "neutral choice".
If the president would like to speak to the American people, why not choose something not affiliated with any company.
But, as a non-American, what do I know.
That is, the site would be free to keep logs on the videos viewed by visitors to its own site as well as those embedded on blogs, but it would opt to immediately forget all identifying information associated with requests from government sites.
First I watched some hairy milf porn, then some stuff on how ot win on "Call of Duty", then I watched some heavy metal and cop killing rap music videos, a Joel Osteen sermon, then I watched this guy with an Uzi with a silencer knock off a bunch of targets (way cool!), and then I watched Obama's weekly address.
A few hours later, this black helicopter lands in my front yard and a bunch of guys kick my door down! I mean, WTF!?!
Flash? When HTML 5 is done they can use the tag.
"Choosing instead to use a Flash-based solution"
Last time I checked, YouTube uses flash as well.
Yes, but they want something they can use for THIS presidential term.
Thank you! Thank you! I'm here all week! Try the veal!
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
They include an MP4 and text so you don't even need a video player to know what was said.
Oh, OK, sweet. MP4 and other options ARE available...
Stupid me. THIS is why slashdotters should RTFA, FIRST, heheheh....
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
What can Google do that the US government can't do?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
If a video of someone's preschooler summarizing Star Wars requires a tracking cookie to access, well, if you want to stay completely private, you just go without the video.
If the President of the United States is using a service as an official distribution channel, though, it's not enough to say "If you don't like the policy, don't view the content." The President's official communication is, in essence, something that the American People have a *right* to view, and not to be tracked while doing it.
Let's just get a little 1984 here: What if it became, somehow, "right" to always watch the President's videos? Or wrong? And so, with the law behind them, the government subpoenaed those tracking cookie results, and determined who was being a good/bad little boy/girl?
Or more mundane: say someone works for Google, and has some access to that data. And has political differences from his/her spouse... so they look up the home IP in the tracking database for the President's videos. Domestic squabbles ensue because someone's listening to "that one" when they're not "supposed" to be.
Participation in the political process is both voluntary and an entitlement for most Americans between 18 and death. Tracking any part of that participation has the potential for abuse, and could have a chilling effect.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
Akamai is an odd choice of platform if The White House is concerned about privacy. Akamai serve about 20% of the world's Internet traffic and function as a "content delivery platform" for many big-name websites. Most of the work they do is in caching images and interactive media, as well as serving ads for many websites to improve loading speed. They are like Google in many ways, in that they have a massively distributed server network that spans 70 countries and are ingrained in many peoples' browsing experience.
One of the things they are best known for is Internet usage statistics. They provide good indicators of general Internet use and use of specific services.
Also like Google, they track users using various means, and use the details to profit. Most importantly, they use this information for advert targeting.
There are two dissimilarities between Google and Akamai (ignoring the obvious dissimilarity of the two companies' models): Akamai have spent most of their life trying to find ways to make a profit and Akamai receive a lot less public scrutiny because their services are transparent to the end-user.
If YouTube was abandoned due to Google's privacy practices, privacy advocates should be as concerned about the privacy practices of Akamai. Indeed, the extent to which Akamai tracks users needs to be investigated and exposed for the sake of public scrutiny.