The fact that Google has to resort to this is amusing. To me it means they can't do it any other way and are now leaving themselves wide open for us the techies to strip that tracking ID; which we absolutely will do.
Things must be getting desperate somewhere in HQ.
Good.
If you want power and customizability, check out Request Control.
uBlock Origin can also block this by adding the following rules (Dashboard > My Filters tab):
! tracking param https://twitter.com/OldRowSwig/status/1732112446943269347
||youtube.com^$removeparam=si
||youtu.be^$removeparam=siI think a better approach though is to whitelist allowed attributes rather than blacklist disallowed attributes. For example, if you get a URL starting "https://www.youtube.com/watch?" then the only allowed attributes are v, t, etc and everything else would be stripped.
[1] https://github.com/ClearURLs/Rules/commit/f4d52da5902640d4d0...
Host: *.youtube.com
Path: /watch*
Types: Document
Action: Filter
Check "Filter URL Redirection"
List of Trimmed Query Parameters: v t list index time_continue
Check "Invert trimming"
'time_continue' is used when you navigate to Youtube from an embedded video. 'index' is used in playlists.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/requestcontro...
I don't think it means that (although I wish it did): it's just another connecting datapoint, and more connecting datapoints are always good from their perspective.
(I think it's helpful to think about these things from Google's perspective: they're running a service that ~billions of people access and share daily. 95% or more of those people won't know how to strip those identifiers; the 5% or so that do are put on the slightly-less-happy-path for social graph discovery.)
What I am saying is that they chose a very lame way to do it and this robs them of very valuable data they could get from those 5% and I'd argue that they really would want to know how you and me are moving and discovering stuff when we're outside YouTube.
Trying hard not to have the protagonist syndrome here but I'd think they are more interested in how the non-couch-surfers do stuff.
Though a very good counter-argument would be that they can now target ads better and probably gain slightly higher conversation regardless of us the 5% stripping the tracking parameter, and that would still be a huge financial win for them.
All in all, my stance is: let them have it, but I still find it reassuring that they are not even covert about it which gives us a lot of options on how to deny them.
Finally, there's the possibility of various browsers and addons to start automatically removing the tracking parameter, though such movements usually take years.
Reddit too, but I don't have a news source for it. I can only share a link I came across: https://reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/s/LCv7yIwiVF
If you click on the link, you can see all the tracking parameters in the URL bar. Whosever link this is used the official Reddit iOS app to generate the unique URL.
This is purely an extra data point; without it, there is 0 attribution for which user is responsible for a link to a video causing that video to go viral, besides the referrer header.
They have experimented with other ways to do this in the past. For example, they used to have a direct friends list on YouTube where you could share videos to specific friends or groups of friends at once.
Also there’s no treachery afoot here… go ahead and remove it, the stakes here are very low.
As for the indistinguishable URLs, you have a solid point there but I'd think there would be a lot of outrage because people want those URLs to generate previews when pasted in pages, social media comments etc.
Not to mention all the false positives generated by people embedding such URLs.
So I think for now we're safe on that front, they would poison their own well if they went ahead with encoded URL identifiers, happily.
But again, I am very amused that they just outright added "?si=..." -- to me that reeks of desperation and I have to admit that I enjoy it when Google is struggling.