White House Exempts YouTube From Web Privacy Rules 235
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."
Other sites comply just fine (Score:5, Informative)
Other gov sites broadcast video just fine without using cookies: http://www.america.gov/multimedia/video.html?videoId=8789243001 [america.gov]
Why can't whitehouse.gov?
Re:This is disturbing... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Informative)
Read this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie#Privacy_and_third-party_cookies
Re:red title background (Score:3, Informative)
More like "time for frist psot pissing contest!".
Re:So... WTF? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:The U.S. government should have its own servers (Score:3, Informative)
Interestingly, if you go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qN1S1LdkUeg [youtube.com] you'll see that there is a "click to download" option. As far as I can see, all of this account's videos are downloadable.
full of sound and fury; signifying nothing... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:They can't control external websites (Score:5, Informative)
The rule applies to federal agencies. Last I checked, youtube wasn't a federal agency, so it's not really much of a story. Slow news day?
If you don't want cookies block the damn things. (Score:5, Informative)
> 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.
Re:They can't control external websites (Score:4, Informative)
No point in reinventing the wheel. YouTube is the thing for videos right now, so why not use it? People who keep sniping about gov't waste should be happy about this stuff.
Quitely? (Score:1, Informative)
It states clearly and explicitly in their own privacy statement that Youtube is exempt from the tracker cookie issue and the reason why.
we really are scraping the barrel when a news story can be summed up by event + adverb = conspiracy.
Re:They can't control external websites (Score:5, Informative)
Just wanted to say that I gotta agree with you there. I didn't, but then they got YouTube to add a download option for their videos. You can play them in your browser with fairly standard tech (Even Linux has pretty good flash support now - I know, I use it. It's buggy at times, but YouTube always works fine) and you can download it in MPEG format if it won't play. Works for me.
Re:This is disturbing... (Score:3, Informative)
But google was such a substantial donor [opensecrets.org]!
Re:This is disturbing... (Score:2, Informative)
Just like microsoft ... and look ... the first proprietary inauguration in the history of the nation.
Re:This is disturbing... (Score:2, Informative)
Obviously, were this Bush, we would have pointed out that the president of the US can now go to his campaign donors and ask them who looked at what section of the whitehouse.gov site.
Since he's going to spend over a trillion dollars which will have no effect whatsoever on the economy, this will come in very handy.
But it's the "messiah", so it's all just perfectly normal. As if the whitehouse is not capable of hosting it's own videos WITHOUT tracking ...