Privacy

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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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It seems like YouTube have changed their link tracking to include more information (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by TWeaK@lemm.ee to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Up until like a year or two ago, YouTube links always used to be pretty clean. The format was youtube .com/watch?v=[video_ID]. A year or two ago, they started adding a tracking suffix on, so it would be youtube .com/watch?v=[video_ID] &si=[tracking_ID].

Over the last day or so, I've noticed links with a different format, youtube .com/watch?v=[video_ID]&pp=[tracking_ID] - only the pp= string is much longer than the si= string. This can only be because they're including more information in it. What that information is is anyone's guess.

This is basically a PSA to watch YouTube links more carefully, as people are by and large complacent with them (moreso than other links) and never even realised the si= change, let alone this new pp= change.

It could also be that the change to pp= is meant to circumvent communities, like this one, which automatically filter out the si= suffix. They may have decided to address that, then took the opportunity to make their tracking more severe.

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[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

So long as there's no extra suffix after, it shouldn't be so bad. So if you have youtu.be/?v=[video_ID] it's fine, but if there's a &si= or &pp= or &anything=, then that's most likely tracking and should be removed.

? is the start of the suffixes, & denotes a change in suffix. Every video has a v= suffix to denote the video itself, but everything else isn't needed.

[–] FrostyPolicy@suppo.fi 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

? is the start of the suffixes, & denotes a change in suffix

Technically speaking they are query parameters not suffixes.

[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Can't they be both? Potato potahto.

Thank you for the correct terminology though.

[–] FrostyPolicy@suppo.fi 2 points 4 weeks ago

Can’t they be both? Potato potahto.

It will destroy the Universe if we do that. /s