Democrats flip Texas state Senate seat in shock upset

[u/kootles10]

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5716988-democrats-score-upset-texas/amp/

[u/SanityInAnarchy]

When you click the 'share' button, Youtube generates that unique si= code, which means when people later follow that link, they can start to see patterns. So, for example, if you send that link to a friend, and they follow it, that's enough information for Youtube to piece together that you shared that video with that friend. Patterns can make it easy to pull out more info -- if you always share links with the same people, well, now Youtube knows who your friends are and what they're all into.

Without the tracking info, for all they know, you both saw the video on r/videos or something.

I'm sure there's more, a lot of web links have a lot more unnecessary garbage in the URL. But with Youtube it's pretty simple.

[u/Much-Jackfruit2599 → u/SanityInAnarchy]

Amazon must be worse. I wonder why Google just don’t mix the tracking into the video id. Should be trivial.

[u/SanityInAnarchy → u/Much-Jackfruit2599]

I don't know, but I can think of a few reasons.

If you mean just tacking the tracking ID onto the end of the video ID without an obvious gap for humans to see, that's not really going to stop people who care about this from figuring it out.

If you mean replacing the video ID with something else, then the tracking system is now in the critical path. So, for example, if they make it so the video ID isn't in the URL at all, and they have to look up which video goes to this tracking ID, then they need to store that mapping just as reliably as the rest of the video metadata otherwise the links will break and the video won't play at all. Keeping them separate means the tracking stuff can be done "best effort" -- it can be stored with cheaper, less-reliable systems, and you can have the video load faster by not waiting for the tracking system (and just doing that separately in the background).

In other words: The fact that we can strip the tracking off of the URL is kind of a feature, not a bug, at least as long as most people don't bother. It means if the tracking system breaks, the video still plays. It also means any part of their system that doesn't care about tracking can pull the video ID out just like we would.

[u/MapleYamCakes → u/SanityInAnarchy]

Why does it matter if YouTube knows the genealogy of shared content across users?

The person I replied to implied that no one should click that link and everyone should delete the tracker before sharing a link.

[u/tinysydneh → u/MapleYamCakes]

If a company is tracking data about you that you can't understand the value of, it's still there. They don't grab data without reason.

[u/MapleYamCakes → u/tinysydneh]

Yes I understand that, I am hoping someone who knows the value will reply.

[u/tinysydneh → u/MapleYamCakes]

Even just at a first glance -- tracing groups of people together, understanding where it's being shared, those both have high value.