Block embedded videos from Youtube

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If we're going to go there, I'd lump in all of its "competitors" at the same time (sorry, I don't have a full list at my fingertips, but dailymotion, vimeo, and wistia come to mind). Historically, we've treated video embeds as normal content and not as noise. This is a policy decision (and not one I'd change lightly, as doing so is likely to piss off a significant segment of the user base).

Besides, anyone who isn't blocking Flash Player outside of Ghostery (e.g. using Firefox's Ask to Activate setting, Chromium's chrome://settings/content > Plug-ins = Click to play, the ClickToFlash or ClickToPlugin extension on Safari, etc.) is probably Doing It Wrong anyway, and "double blocking" is usually more annoying than helpful.

For the use case given, an extension like YouTube Embed2Link for Firefox may be a better solution.

• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fire...

I didn't know that Ghostery treats things as either “normal content” or “noise”. I thought that Ghostery treats things as “trackers”. A tracker is a tracker no matter whether it delivers normal content or noise. Youtube will track my visit no matter whether I think their service is normal or noise. Youtube has just as much power to track viewers as Google Analytics.

I don't even have Flash Player installed. Most sites have an iframe from Youtube instead of Flash. The iframe is capable of playing HTML5 video, but that's beside the point, as the iframe would track people even if it didn't support HTML5 video.

If you don't want to piss off users, then make a category called “Useful widgets” so that people can easily choose not to block that category if they don't want to. If they block videos, they can simply click to play, which is not annoying. To that category you can add Youtube and Vimeo as well as Google Maps and other map services. Sometimes I like to see maps, but only when I choose to. Sometimes I rather don't want to let Google track what place I'm reading about. If I choose to see a map, I rather want to view it in the full version of Google Maps instead of the embedded widget.

Thanks for telling about the Embed2Link extension. I searched for something similar for Chromium and couldn't find.

Let's just say, you aren't the first person to ask about this. And I'm keenly aware it seems inconsistent w.r.t. say, Brightcove.

YouTube offers an embedding option called Enable privacy-enhanced mode:

Enabling this option means that YouTube won't store information about visitors on your web page unless they play the video.

• https://support.google.com/youtube/an...

Sounds great, right? Unfortunately, the decision is made by whoever embeds the video, not the person viewing it. Changing it after the fact is out of scope for Ghostery.

The current "widgets" category implies "useful." This isn't all black and white. I know a lot of people are looking for an "install and ignore" solution (à la Bluhell Firewall), but that's just not what we're about.

I don't think we're going to get a consensus on this, which is how we ended up in a compromise situation to begin with. Privacy and convenience are often at odds with each other. As it is, we face a lot of criticism for doing the "right" thing. There are certain "hot-button issues" — this is one of them — where we have to be very careful, lest we end up drowning in a storm of protests. For example, whatever we do, we mustn't "break" Gmail. As the world's most popular webmail service, it's the closest thing we have to a sacred cow. Politically, we can't single out YouTube without that being perceived as Google-bashing. Despite the calls from a vocal minority of Google haters, cooler heads need to prevail here. (Hence my insistence that no one else be given a pass for doing what amounts to the same thing. That goes for maps as well as videos.)

When it comes to privacy compliance, companies like Google and Facebook are subject to a lot more scrutiny than their smaller competitors. The latter are the ones you really need to be concerned about, because they aren't getting the same level of oversight. We also need to look at this from a global perspective; companies like Google and Microsoft may dominate in the U.S.A., but that isn't necessarily the case in the rest of the world. With the initial set of localizations, Ghostery is now struggling to move past its anglophone roots. The "squeaky wheel" approach has served us well so far, but it did leave a few gaps.

Your points are valid. However, getting there is going to take a path that's neither straight nor smooth.

Sounds great, right? Unfortunately, the decision is made by whoever embeds the video, not the person viewing it. Changing it after the fact is out of scope for Ghostery.

Sounds like fake privacy, just like the ridiculous do-not-track header which just sends trackers more information to track. The existence of that option just proves that Youtube tracks people. I don't want fake privacy by changing such a setting. I want real privacy by blocking the HTTP request before it reaches Youtube, just like Ghostery is already doing with all other trackers.

The current "widgets" category implies "useful."

Then I see no obstacle against adding video and map widgets to that category. If big widgets such as Disqus can be blocked, then it's no worse to have the option to block Youtube, Vimeo, Google Maps and Bing Maps. (Vimeo and Bing mentioned to show that I don't intend to single out Google)

When it comes to privacy compliance, companies like Google and Facebook are subject to a lot more scrutiny than their smaller competitors. The latter are the ones you really need to be concerned about, because they aren't getting the same level of oversight.

I'm not concerned about Google. I'm concerned about the NSA and any future government which may be much worse than the NSA. They will take any data they want out of the hands of Google. The secret requests by the NSA are not even allowed to be subject to scrutiny. Big companies are tracking more sites, and therefore know more about how people move across the web. I don't want to get into an argument about whether big or small companies are the most dangerous. I just want to point out that the size of a company doesn't make it safe. Your privacy is your own responsibility, and cannot be outsourced.