I would like to see a new rule put in place regarding YouTube videos

I have seen many times in the forum people sharing youtube links like this: https://youtu.be/vGZEzkuLEyM?si=CycXZfp8WPzR0mOM

The ?si= parameter is a tracking method by google. More info here: https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1qlrcg5/please_start_cleaning_the_links_you_share/

I would like to see a new rule that says something like "this parameter is a invasion of privacy. please remove it in order to post the video."

Thanks for considering!

🙈 oh I'm so sorry, I left a link to celtic woman's latest tour video. I don't know about this...if you want me go edit or remove it I can because anyways we will know where to find it.. thanks

🙈 oh I'm so sorry, I left a link to celtic woman's latest tour video. I don't know about this...if you want me go edit or remove it I can because anyways we will know where to find it.. thanks

Please do. Google has vacuumed enough information about people and we don't want to give them more.

Just remove the ?si= and everything after it and you should be good to go.

I don't think this is needed I havn't seen that till this post and I have tested yesterday to copy a youtube URL and I never got that SI code but then I don't use Google chrome for a browser I don't even have it on my computer because it's made by google and I don't trust anything made by google. Plus I have looked into the coding and I can't get anything to tell me anything about it and where it comes from. Sorry if this is not what you wanted to hear and it would make posting harder for some people


GlenS

They're also getting injected into other links too, such as Spotify. I saw links going back as far as at least 2019 making use of this.

I think if people are aware of this insideous tracking scheme and we try to be careful that will somewhat mitigate its perpetuation. We might be able to disallow the "?si=" string, but I don't want to make things annoying enough that people post less.

For now, I did a string match for the si parameter (?si=) and manually scrubbed a bunch of the existing ones, preserving the time parameter (&t=) which generally follows the si parameter, if present. I left a few examples where you called it out.

I also added a news banner notice about it for awareness. We can keep that running for a little while to remind people.

If you also use a good browser like Duckduckgo you don't get the SI code This is all you get https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=908p-2qjM0Y  No google tracking code