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."

Re:whitehouse.gov

[grantek]

Next up, a FF extension to take a blacklist of domains and insert random data into cookies that are requested by them. name=LOGIN_INFO content=osamaobamabombnukebananarama

Re:OH NOES! PANIC!

[Obama]

The orbital mind control laser. You know too much.

Re:OH NOES! PANIC!

[AioKits]

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.

Re:whitehouse.gov

[Yvan256]

Hum.... nuked bananas.... <drool> /Homer

Re:whitehouse.gov

[An ominous Cow art]

Hmm... naked Bananarama... /me

Re:They can't control external websites

[FiloEleven]

Smoking is bad for you. Here, we bake it into cookies. You want one?

Re:The only reason

[tbannist]

If that's all the he does to pay back his 4th largest contributor, that'd put him in contention for least corruption politician ever.

I don't think shows anything other than Obama's web staff like using YouTube on the White House web site.

Re:This is disturbing...

[Firehed]

From TFS, it sounds like you may get long-term cookies from whitehouse.gov (regardless of what youtube.com provides) on pages (or paths I suppose; I don't think you can do page-specific cookies) containing embedded youtube videos. It could use some additional clarification for sure.

Naturally, I didn't read TFA either.

Re:OH NOES! PANIC!

[sheph]

You think that's bad??? I'm still waiting for my CHANGE!!!

One more reason for them to not use YouTube

[betterunixthanunix]

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.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, great. You've slashdotted a whole country.

Re:They can't control external websites

[Briareos]

Yeah I did not know about that change until...just now.

But... change is what Obama promised all along - and now you act surprised? :*P

np: The Whitest Boy Alive - Done With You (Dreams)

Re:OH NOES! PANIC!

[recharged95]

What would happen if you got your change and it was in euros! That would be change you can't believe in...

,

,

(well unless you're in Europe).