While looking into the possibility to play embedded YouTube clips with html5’s video-element on this blog, I noticed Google added an ‘Enable privacy-enhanced mode‘ flag to the embed-options. This small tweak ensures that visitors who arrive on a page that has YouTube embedded, don’t immediately get tracking cookies stuffed down their throat. Unless they play the video or click through to youtube.com, that is.
Enabling the “enhanced privacy” option just changes the URL in the embed code from youtube.com to youtube-nocookie.com;
<object width="560" height="340"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/FuGJfVAgiTM&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/FuGJfVAgiTM&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="340"></embed></object>
The change has no impact whatsoever on the user experience, so I immediately tweaked the code of the Smart YouTube WordPress plugin on my server and I asked the developer to add the option to his plugin as well.
Yet another small step in the fight against Google’s omniscience!