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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!?!
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.
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.