The rights of users when interacting with web sites has been a hot-button topic lately, with Facebook receiving a great deal of media attention after controversially changing its site's terms. After the outrage died down, Facebook responded by crafting new operating procedures to involve its users in any future rule-changes. Now the Obama White House is facing its own users' rights issue, due to privacy concerns. In its latest move, the administration has abandoned YouTube for its embedded clips, apparently in an effort to insulate users from YouTube's tracking cookies.

Like many other web sites, YouTube places a cookie on your computer when you visit one of its pages. This small download lets YouTube uniquely identify your computer and keep track of what you do on its site. This is clearly disclosed in its privacy policy. You may not like the site tracking you, but that's why you're free to not visit it, should you choose.

The problem for the White House is that in using YouTube to embed videos on its site, it was exposing users to these cookies. The White House has a higher standard of privacy protections in place than YouTube does, and though it also uses cookies, its are set to expire shortly after their issue, and don't track users over the long term.

At first the White House changed the way videos were linked, so that YouTube would only generate a cookie if you actually went to play the clip; just viewing a page with an embedded video wouldn't start tracking you by default. It updated its privacy policy to explain how YouTube used cookies and granted the company an exemption to the cookie rules for content on federally-affiliated sites. Now though, it seems to have abandoned YouTube altogether as its streaming provider for embedded clips.

The clips on the site now use a custom Flash-based player, streaming the videos from a server that doesn't expose the user to tracking cookies. Though you can continue to access White House videos on YouTube, there's no longer a direct link between the sites to muddy up these privacy issues. Perhaps in response to White House action, YouTube recently added a new option to let anyone embed a clip without forcing the tracking cookie until the clip is played. Although that's a smart move on YouTube's part, it might not be enough to get the White House to go back to its old embedding strategies. Unless the new server has trouble handling the load, this solution the White House has cooked up looks like a clean way to fix its cookie problem for good.

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