Students at the Ohio State University Open Source Club have made some excellent and much-needed upgrades to EFF's MyTube software. Real privacy risks are presented by all of the Web's solutions for embedded video — from user-generated-content sites like YouTube to proprietary sites like MSNBC and Comedy Central. When you visit a site with embedded video, you're not only sending your information to your destination site, but also to the website which hosts that video. In addition, you're allowing the video-host to place cookies and other tracking devices onto your computer. This means that loading an embedded video from within a blog could enable the video hosting site (and, in some cases, its advertising partners) to compile a history of which blog entries you were reading and when — even if you didn't try to play the video. In February 2008, as a way to free EFF.org from this risk, we developed MyTube. It's a plugin for Drupal, the open-source content management system that powers EFF.org. It ma Read More... |
