In my previous post, I embedded a YT video. I am fully aware of the trackers an embed comes with, yet I did it anyway. The main reason: I know people are generally lazy browsers so clicking on a link is already a lot of work. A second reason: I placed the embed at a position in the article when it’s logical to watch the video before reading on. If I’d put in a link saying something like ‘go watch the video on YT before reading on’, you either click on the link, go to YT and get distracted with all the other wonderful videos YT has to offer you, or you don’t click the link, read on and don’t know what I’m talking about.
So from a communicative perspective (as is my original profession), embedding a video makes a lot of sense to make the entire reading experience better, but that also means Google is watching you when you’re reading my post or visiting my website (unless you have an ad-blocker running in your browser).
Is this a bad thing? Do you feel uncomfortable when I embed a video in a post? Should I stop embedding videos? Really interested to hear your point of view on this.
By coincidence I looked at various embeds and tracking a few weeks ago ( https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2020/01/i-dont-track-you-here-but-others-might/ ). One of the things I learned is that YT videos have a ‘no cookies’ setting in their embed code. If you select share/embed there is a ‘privacy mode’ checkbox. It does not fully disable tracking, but tracks only visitors when the video is played. Then it is similar to that visitor going to YT. (It also means: don’t use autoplay)
I have tried to stop embedding things on ruk.ca completely. When I have my own video to post, I encode it as WebM and MP4, upload it to Amazon S3, and then use HTML markup to include it in a post.
When I find video on YouTube or elsewhere that’s licensed for re-use, I download it and then do the same.
Otherwise, I link.
I changed the embed code to the no cookies version. It indeed gets rid of the Double-Click tracker. For now, I’ll leave it at that, since it is then similar to clicking on the video inside the youtube website, from a data collecting point of view. And downloading and re-sharing via Amazon is a bridge too far for this lazy browser 😉
@elmine it is probably a problem related to gdpr. As for me personally I don’t care because I use my own setup to keep some privacy when it comes to tracking. Also I’m reading your feed that doesn’t embed anyway 😁
There’s some no cookies domain for YT you could use tho. Find that option in extended embed dialog on share. Not much use if a visitor is logged in to G tho.
I doubt there’s a good solution for privacy and usability at the same time. To embed or not to embed by an author (IN FULL FLOW)
In my previous post, I embedded a YT video. I am fully aware of the trackers an embed comes with, yet I did it anyway. The main reason: I know people are generally lazy browsers so clicking on a link is already a lot of work. A second reason: I placed the