CNET:
Why Obama should ditch YouTube
Posted by Chris Soghoian
President-elect Barack Obama has now posted his second weekly address to YouTube, and it has already gotten more than 411,000 views. A week ago, I criticized the use of YouTube by Obama's transition team, calling it a no-bid giveaway to the Google-owned video-sharing site.The solution I called for then--the adoption of BitTorrent as the official distribution platform for Change.gov--was, admittedly, a pipe dream.
In this post, I'll explain why the government needs to step up and host its own videos and why it is simply improper to rely on YouTube to foot the bandwidth bill for Obama's messages to the people. I will also make the case that the use of YouTube and Google Analytics by the Obama transition team violates the privacy of Web site visitors and possibly even violates federal rules banning the use of permanent tracking cookies on government sites. ...
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Comments (1)
Last week I was playing around with YouTube on the www.change.gov site (Obama's transition site) and I had my "View Cookies" subwindow open in Firefox. I expected and got some YouTube cookies even before I clicked on Obama's YouTube weekly radio address, but I was suprised that I also got a google.com cookie as soon as I started the video. It's sneaky because you don't see the fetch to google.com in your status bar. Apparently it's done somewhat differently (maybe with JavaScript?) for the browser, after the initial connection to YouTube is made that sets up the video you just clicked.
This is the permanent Google cookie that used to expire in 2038, but now expires never, since it constanly moves ahead two years every time you access a Google site. It's the main cookie with the globally-unique ID. Most people already have a Google cookie, so the existing ID is merely read by google.com. But if you don't have one already, it sets one. That's the only way I noticed it with my "View Cookies" window open, after I had cleared all cookies in that window. It takes about three seconds after you start watching the video for the phone-home to Google that causes the new cookie to appear.
The GET request sent by your browser to google.com, courtesy of YouTube, includes the web page you're on, as well as the ID of the video you clicked on. I watched this happen with Wireshark (a packet sniffer).
This happens with every YouTube clicked from anywhere. It happens with Obama's site, it happens on http://www.eff.org/pages/UGC-test-suite and it happens on www.youtube.com itself.
I feel that Google has gone too far with this. The YouTube privacy policy doesn't mention that they phone home for the google.com cookie. Unless we make an issue out of this, I suspect that Obama will cancel the no-persistent-cookie policy that Clinton put in place in 2000, once he takes office.
In the meantime, we need better disclosure of the fact that Google is tracking YouTube viewers with its universal google.com cookie. It really grates me when the major news media show an Obama YouTube segment on the major news, and there's that YouTube logo in the bottom right corner. You can't even purchase pro-YouTube advertising that's this valuable, and viewers should be aware that it comes at a price. Viewers must go to extra lengths to delete their cookies regularly, if they're in the habit of watching YouTube videos.