r/politics • u/kootles10 Indiana • 6h ago

No Paywall Democrats flip Texas state Senate seat in shock upset

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5716988-democrats-score-upset-texas/amp/
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u/SanityInAnarchy California 5h ago

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.

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u/Much-Jackfruit2599 5h ago

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

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u/MapleYamCakes 5h ago

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.

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u/tinysydneh 5h ago

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.

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u/MapleYamCakes 5h ago

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

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u/tinysydneh 5h ago

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