Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

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 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by TWeaK@lemm.ee to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

19 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] lol@discuss.tchncs.de 36 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

It encodes the contents of the search bar.

E.g. for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw&pp=ygUTZmlyc3QgeW91dHViZSB2aWRlbw%3D%3D

ygUTZmlyc3QgeW91dHViZSB2aWRlbw== is first youtube video in base64, which is what I typed into the search bar to find that video.

Not sure if that's actually useful for tracking or if there's another technical reason for it, but at the very least it could accidentally expose your search terms to others if you end up sharing links like that.

[–] WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

that's interesting. do you perhaps also know what the si param contains?

[–] lol@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 22 hours ago

No, I don't know. If I had to guess, si might be short for something like "source identifier" and just contain some unique identifier to track who originally shared a link that others are using.

[–] user224@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 2 days ago

Oh, that's how you get it. I just tried it and got the regular si link which doesn't seem to have valid b64 data.