Something I’ve never once understood over the past decade or so of being online has been the absolute love that people have for Google — not just the “oh, they have neat services” aspect, but the fact that people will go out of their way to ignore their constant begging for user data (as the core part of their business model) yet at the same time criticize a service like Facebook for the same obsession with data collection.
In the event you wanted any kind of evidence of this data collection being a big deal with Google, how about this fact: YouTube apparently tracks users who even so much as visit pages which contain embedded videos, tossing a cookie on their system regardless of if they actually click on the embedded video or not.
Interestingly, this option can be disabled by the person embedding the video – the problem is they need to select an option at the time of generating the embedding code, and of course most people are not aware this is even an option – they just generate the code, embed to the page, and that’s that to them.
This means that people who might visit a page with a video embedded will still, if they wish to or not, be being tracked by Google just as much as they would were they browsing on YouTube itself without any concern. Granted, this is a relatively minor thing, and the options with regard to embedding videos have been there since 2010, but still, it’s something to consider about how the company operates. Old news for sure, but still something many may find less than welcome to discover.
I actually learned of this last night when Dave of the EEVBlog posted this video regarding the phenomena. Yes, there’s always the irony of using a YouTube video to complain about YouTubes privacy invading tactics, and yes, I am quite sure the method I embed videos is not the privacy enhanced form (I’ll see what I can do about that in the future) but the fact remains this is worth sharing, just for the sake of clarity, especially given the rise of things like the GDPR and incidents like Cambridge Analytica. It’s certainly worth looking at, if only for an understanding of how sneakily companies like Google work to gather every bit of tracking data they can on an individual (or at least, an individuals computer) for their own purposes.