But privacy activists may have convinced the White House staff that despite the video-sharing site's ease of use and widespread popularity, long-term tracking cookies inserted by Google's servers into YouTube vistitors' browsers was .
President Obama's videos are still available on the White House . But the taxpayer-supported Whitehouse.gov site now serves up a Flash player of its own, and the latest video is served by content mirroring service Akamai. To watch the President's update, you'll need to install this player.
So, does the change make privacy activists happy? Of course not! CNet blogger Chris Soghoian, a student fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, has a detailed on the observed technical changes and why the setup is "still not perfect" in his view: First, the White House site uses an "invisible pixel" tracking technology made by WebTrends. Second, the site's privacy policy doesn't mention this. Third, YouTube should reconfigure its serves not to track visitors to government sites.
Representatives for both YouTube and the White House declined to be quoted for Soghoian's story. Given that government transparency was one of Obama's major campaign promises, it seems odd that his administration hasn't issued a basic statement on the .