Comments on: White House exempts YouTube from privacy rules

The Obama White House has quietly granted YouTube an exemption from strict federal rules that prohibit the use of cookies to collect information from visitors to federal agency Web sites.

[RUExperienced]

A decade ago I worked for an analytical company that worked with cookies. After the day I started and was shown how the software worked by the developers I locked out cookies from all my browsers! With the common knowledge today about cookies I am surprised anyone allows them blindly anymore. Now I realize some sites require cookies to login, hence why I use multiple browsers. Protect your privacy and block all cookies!

[BIGELLOW]

This is old news, covered on several different occasions by different end-of-world theorists throughout the years of the existence of the White House website.

The reason YouTube is exempted from this policy is because it is a third-party site. The no-cookies rule has only ever applied to the White House website itself. It just happens that we have reached an age where streaming video is becoming popular and it is more expensive to setup servers to stream video than it is to just host the video on a third-party site like YouTube. Given this, it means that the White House website has to rely on a third-party site to perform this action (of streaming video,) so this has become a more prominent issue.

The reality is, there is not much difference between someone going to the White House website and watching a video... or going to YouTube and performing a search for "Obama" or "white house". The fact that the government chooses not to use persistent cookies on government sites has nothing to do with whether or not commercial sites are allowed to use persistent cookies on their own sites. If the White House site had to rely on additional third-party commercial websites to function, those sites would also be exempted from the rule... which, again, only applies to government websites, not every third-party commercial entity the government happens to do business with.

[Daniel_Brandt]

Chris, you make it sound like it's only the YouTube cookies at issue. Do you realize that when you click to watch any YouTube video anywhere on the web, whether it's at the White House site or YouTube.com itself, about ten seconds into the video, the Flash code driving the video phones home to Google. It offers up the famous Google.com persistent cookie if you already have one, or plants one if you don't. This is the cookie with the globally-unique ID that used to expire in 2038, but now it ostensibly expires in two years. Of course, it doesn't really expire in two years, because every time you visit any Google site it pushes the expiration date two years ahead.

The GET request from the Flash code to Google.com includes the page URL and the YouTube video ID, and of course, the IP address (which can be geolocated), and the Google cookie with it's own ID, and it all gets logged with a date and time stamp.

I'll bet the White House cut a deal with Eric Schmidt to get access to Google's stats on White House video traffic. That sucks -- not because the White House shouldn't have anonymized stats on their own site, but because Google shouldn't have those stats themselves. Google doesn't properly anonymize its data. How else to you explain this compromise of Clinton's executive order that was issued in 2000? The White House is just lazy -- they certainly have the resources to offer videos without tracking those who choose to view the videos.

[ZetaZeta_]

Basic setting in all browsers: "Block all cookies." This isn't really a big issue. There's also in-private/incognito/stealther, as well as simply clearing your browsing history every so often.

If users can't do that, then (opinion:) they probably wouldn't care less about what a website stores on their PC.

[dbroham]

yawn...YouTube jealousy.

[webemma]

Look at it from a different perspective. Should the federal government be building out an expensive infrastructure to do video, when it's available as a commodity, for free? When youtube provides the bandwidth, which otherwise can get quite expensive? How much IT should government have to recreate, instead of focusing on core service to citizens? How much should they spend on IT to reinvent the wheel?

The cookies issue is way overblown.

[rfreedmancnet]

Yes.

If the federal government is going to make a habit of posting videos for consumption by the public, then it should have the infrastructure to host them. I am incensed that YouTube (or any private company) makes a profit of any sort when I choose to communicate with my government.

I think that it would be fine for the government to procure such a system from, say, YouTube (Google), as long as it is a separate system, and there is no direct profit tied to a citizen watching a video.

I'm am (was) a big Obama supporter, but I'm saddened and dismayed by this behavior.

[Pete Bardo]

rfreedmancnet,

Someone almost always makes money when you communicate with your government. If you phone in, if you email, if you snail mail or even show up in person, someone is going to get paid along the way. Are you suggesting the the data YouTube collects amounts to profits? I'm not so sure about that. Is YouTube also displaying its own ads when you play a video from BO?

This could very well be a privacy issue--I'm not so sure about that either--but it's hardly an issue of YouTube making profits from this. BTW, has YouTube actually mad a profit from anything yet?

[digitalshaman]

how uniformed ...

there is an alternative internet that is constantly being built out ... the "internet" is a network of networks; but, many of these inter-nets are not shared nor is any "persistent" unique identifier deployed ...

any interactions with the "state" should include respect for the First Amendment, in any IT infrastructure, built or repurposed, period.

you think providing IT is "free" ... uh-huh ... well, give me some of that Google upside if my unique ID is being used for profit seeking purposes.

and if we cannot agree on a balance between privacy & piracy let alone technical incompetence by our citizens, yes, please explain the concept "focusing on core service to citizens"?

fwiw, here is my belief - the "core service of the US Government is to uphold the Constitution" & the rule of the law it has shaped since it was ratified over 200 years ago.

PS honestly, reminds me of a sign at many Florida marina-bars _ "free beer on tap - tomorrow" - i want transparency, now

[hhs2112]

Pete_Bardo - yes, you're correct in that when I communicate with the government someone is making money. The difference here is the government is funneling business to a SOLE supplier. If I call the government I pay the phone company of MY choice, not one dictated by the administration. For your analogy to be accurate the government would have to mandate that only calls from a specific vendor, AT&T for example, are accepted and all calls originating from other suppliers are to be blocked. Or, to continue with your analogy, that all citizens arriving in person must use Joe's Cab Company or all mail must be sent via FedEx.

I?m a big Obama fan and supporter but this is just wrong! If the White House wants to stream videos they need to set up the infrastructure to allow them to do so and not funnel money to Google, who, as we all know, have been called out time and time again by privacy advocates.

Hell, if cost cutting is your big concern why not move all government email to Hotmail, document creation to Google docs, and file storage to Live Mesh? Imagine the bundle we?d save?

[LaCatin]

Wow. Big Brother has arrived. His name is You Tube.

[n3td3v]

White House + NSA + YouTube + Google = New World Order

[testeddoughnut]

It's ok, guys. You can take off your tin-foil hats. I agree, this is a breech of privacy, but some of these comments blow this way out of proportion. If you're concerned about your privacy, block cookies. No matter how much you complain, Google will still push the envelope for information. I mean, remember the outcry that gmail caused a few years ago? It's their business, and they do quite a bit good things with the seemingly meaningless information that they collect.

[hhs2112]

Just curious, what "good things" has google done with the information they collect?

[privacydude]

Remember, cookies aren't forbidden, simply their use by the executive branch for the limited purpose of tracking visitors (note cookies may have other purposes). Assuming the cookie is scoped to a Google owned and controlled domain, then the government would not be receiving this information. Given that they are not receiving it, it would be difficult to then argue that they were using it to "to track visitors' activity on the Internet". I don't think Google would be seen as acting as an agent of the government, and it appears to me that the memo is silent on enabling others to do this for their own purposes. Maybe time for another redraft.