YouTube won't share White House vids with mass

YouTube has agreed to ditch its monitoring cookies for videos viewed on the official

White House Web site, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

"This is a good step and we commend YouTube and the government for taking it," Cindy Cohn, legal director at EFF, wrote in a blog post. "It shows that they recognize that tracking the government videos that Americans view is creepy and wrong. It also shows that Google/YouTube technologists can build and offer clever, useful privacy-protective modifications to their standard software."

Cookies let YouTube maintain a record of embedded videos viewed on outside sites. When whitehouse.gov first started including YouTube videos for things like President Obama's weekly address, privacy advocates raised concern that YouTube was improperly tracking visitors on a government Web site.

In response, YouTube served up a special video player that only sent a cookie when someone played a video, not if they merely visited the site.

"Now YouTube says that they have taken a second step urged by EFF: essentially ignoring their account cookies for videos viewed on Whitehouse.gov," Cohn wrote. "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."

Cohn urged YouTube to make the same move with other Web sites, like "human rights videos, politically sensitive videos, or even ordinary videos where viewers may want privacy should all be available without tracking."

YouTube should also consider "tracking-free" videos across the board for all government Web sites, Cohn said.

In March, there were rumors that the White House had ditched YouTube as its video provider of choice when Obama's weekly address used an embedded player instead of one from the Google-owned site, but YouTube denied it.

In other YouTube news, the video site said Friday that users can set their accounts to automatically update their Facebook, Twitter, and Google Reader accounts with information about videos you have uploaded to YouTube.

"If you change your mind, you can shut it off at any time. And of course, for those videos that you'd rather not share, mark them as private and they won't be sent to any other site," Brian Glick, a product manager for YouTube, wrote in a blog post.

YouTube won't share White House vids with mass

By: raam rahim

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