Friday, June 12, 2009

YouTube Increased Privacy of White House Videos

The Electronic Frontier Foundation yesterday writes:

When the Whitehouse.gov website launched in January, including embedded videos from YouTube, privacy advocates raised concerns that without extra privacy measures, YouTube would be improperly tracking visitors to the government website, including recording which videos were watched and combining that information with the ever-growing amount of information that Google and YouTube have about internet users, through YouTube’s use of cookies.

In response, The White House first made sure that YouTube’s cookies were not served merely upon visiting the website (...)

Now YouTube says that they have taken a second step urged by EFF: essentially ignoring their account cookies for videos viewed on Whitehouse.gov. Ordinarily, YouTube maintains a record of every YouTube video you’ve ever viewed, associated with your YouTube account, through use of the YouTube cookie. Now, they’ve agreed to exempt videos embedded on Whitehouse.gov from this logging.

The EFF says this is a good step. Now, they say, they’d like to see similar approaches being taken beyond just the White House website. “Human rights videos, politically sensitive videos, or even ordinary videos where viewers may want privacy should all be available without tracking.”

If you like what the EFF is doing, you can donate to them.

[Thanks Juha-Matti!]

YouTube Increased Privacy ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (1+0)

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