YouTube links and tracking

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You know those embedded YouTube videos that people post, where you can play the video without visiting YouTube? I was just wondering whether YouTube can track people here who play them like that. They certainly track people who play videos on the YouTube website itself, and they're pretty vigorous about trying to stop anybody from avoiding the tracking, so I was just wondering whether or not they can get their feelers into us via those embedded videos.

What do they track?

Good question. This page for YT "marketers" shows the "15 most important" analytics available to them.

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/youtube-analytics

Mostly they're not too worrying, but no.12 - "Who's watching your videos?" suggests that they can access such parameters as age, gender, location, etc., and seems rather close to the act of tracking and profiling individuals. And if the marketers can access that stuff, what else might Google know about us?

As it's run by Google, who are notorious for selling the private information of users, I wouldn't put it past them to be quietly data mining more aggressively than they'd normally admit to. I also use the NoScript browser plugin, which informs me that a script called Google-Analytics.com would like to run when I'm on WrongPlanet. It's hard to find a website that doesn't have that script. Don't know exactly what it does, but I've never seen any benefit to myself from allowing it, and personally I wouldn't trust it as far as I could throw it.

I use DDG and keep my YT history off, so it doesn't suggest anything to me or keep track of what I'm watching.
That's a good question though.
I know they do seem omnipotent at knowing everything, no matter what.

Using a privacy focussed browser that doesn't track as standard, as Issy mentions above (such as DuckDuckGo) is a starter and it is good practice to keep Youtube history off in one's settings, for privacy purposes.

Aside from that, I think that Youtube has a way of tracking a person even if they don't have an account with Google, or have Youtube history enabled.

I read somewhere that they can log which computer has accessed what due to identifiers such as IP address and the computer itself accessing their servers.

Another step people might want to use to improve their online privacy is to use a VPN which hides one's IP address/location when accessing any website, including Youtube.

Thanks for your replies

I'm not sure how feasible it is for a browser to withhold the IP address (and perhaps the computer ID) from the websites it accesses. The website presumably needs to know where to send its page data (IP address). As for the computer ID, I'd like to know whether there's a browser that definitely withholds that.

As for a VPN, apparently YT can detect that, particularly if you don't get a dedicated VPN IP address, which I suspect would cost a monthly fee. For me, the other problem with using a VPN is that I like to keep my email accounts open all day on the same computer, and turning on a VPN to browse YT has been known to arouse Hotmail's suspicion enough for it to lock me out and give me a thoroughly bad time trying to get back in again.

There may be an easier and cost-free answer to avoiding YT's snooping - just use Invidious rather than YT itself. Apparently, "Google can’t track you through your IP address, cookies, or other info either, since it’s completely separate from Youtube’s API – and doesn’t require Javascript"

https://www.cogipas.com/use-invidious-to-watch-youtube/

But I'm skeptical because to play videos in Invidious, I see that I have to allow a script called Googlevideo.com. So it does require Javascript, and if that article can get that wrong, maybe it's wrong about the tracking?

Which brings me back to my original question - does watching YT videos on WrongPlanet circumvent Google's tracking? Looking at NoScript, I see that embedded videos on WP won't play unless I allow a script called Youtube.com. I see that's a different script from the one that's needed for playing videos in Invidious. So if more was known about what those scripts do, it might be possible to come up with an answer. Unfortunately, with regard to info about scripts, NoScript only leads me to virus-detecting services. Technically, Google isn't guilty of carrying viruses or malware in its scripts, though personally I'd say that anything that has any part in tracking people behind their backs is a form of malware.

What does DDG stand for?

Duck Duck Go

Ah.....I should have guessed

"Who" means the information about you available via your Google account.
Don't have a Google account? - they don't know who you are.

Even if you do have lots of information on your device which identifies you in considerable detail it doesn't somehow become available to Google or anyone else just because you're online.

That's not a script, it's a Google video server.
See the Invidious FAQ - https://docs.invidious.io/faq/ -

^
Thanks, Cornflake, that's helpful. I didn't know about the proxy checkbox for Invidious. Nor did I know that googlevideo.com was a video server and not a script - NoScript simply includes it in its list of scripts, with the option to allow or disallow it, hence my assumption that it was a script.

Google can sure track a person, even a person doesn't use any Google products:

Source: https://spreadprivacy.com/how-does-google-track-me-even-when-im-not-using-it/

"Unlike privacy-focused analytics services, Google uses their Google Analytics tracker for more than just providing information about site visitors and app users to the sites and apps themselves. In many cases Google also adds that same information to Google’s own massive profiles about people. Since Google Analytics is embedded in so many sites, this tracker alone allows Google to see most people’s global browsing history, regardless of whether they use any Google products themselves."

^
That would seem to confirm my suspicions about google-analytics.com. It's a shame, because blocking it can mess up the kind of tracking that websites use simply to collect anonymous stats.

I have some issues with the "ooh, scary!" claims made there, or rather on the page linked from there - https://www.quora.com/What-does-Google- ... rivacy.com

Much of this stuff can be disabled on your Google account, here - https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity

I've never experienced targetted ads nor seen evidence that I'm being tracked when not using Google products.


Not displayed as part of the Quora URL above is the trailing: ?ref=spreadprivacy.com
It becomes visible if you hover your mouse pointer over the URL or quote this post, and it's typical for URL display mechanisms to not show trailing parameters after the basic URL. WP is no different in this respect.

Ironically | Amusingly | Alarmingly (delete as appropriate) - that tracks where you clicked the link, and it has nothing whatever to do with Google.
All the other links on the Spread Privacy page linked by blitzkrieg include the same tracking mechanism.

Make of that what you will.

Facebook adds an insane number of tracking tokens to its off-Facebook URLs. They don't appear when the mouse is hovered over the link. I use a browser plugin called ClearURLs to remove them. Before I had that, I was interested in a project that was hoping to deliberately mess up the game by swapping the tracking elements for junk data, but it never took off. I rather approved of the idea because Facebook does these things so sneakily.

As for whether or not Google is dangerous, I have no first-hand knowledge. It's clear there are differing opinions and stories out there and on here, but I've no idea who is correct. I've never personally seen any ads that have definitely come from Google, probably because I use ad blockers, privacy plugins, and a general "boycott Google wherever practicable" policy, so I hardly ever see any ads on the Web anyway.

I'm still no closer to discovering whether playing embedded YouTube videos on WP is any "safer" than playing them on YouTube itself. I use a browser plugin called Privacy Redirect, which would play them as Invidious videos, but I couldn't stop them auto-playing when I first installed that, in spite of my turning off all the auto-play switches I could find. It caused havoc when there were many videos on a page, because they all played at once - horrible racket - and sent the CPU and core temperature up through the roof. The only way I managed to stop that was to add WP as an exception in Privacy Redirect, which got shut of the auto-play trouble but naturally it removes all Privacy Redirect's intervention from WP's embedded YT links as well.

The tracking of internet users isn't limited to Google, I have had some weird things happen with MSN for example.

But yes, that does seem ironic.