Up until like a year or two ago, YouTube links always used to be pretty clean. The format was youtube .com/watch?v=[video_ID]. A year or two ago, they started adding a tracking suffix on, so it would be youtube .com/watch?v=[video_ID] &si=[tracking_ID].
Over the last day or so, I’ve noticed links with a different format, youtube .com/watch?v=[video_ID]&pp=[tracking_ID] - only the pp= string is much longer than the si= string. This can only be because they’re including more information in it. What that information is is anyone’s guess.
This is basically a PSA to watch YouTube links more carefully, as people are by and large complacent with them (moreso than other links) and never even realised the si= change, let alone this new pp= change.
It could also be that the change to pp= is meant to circumvent communities, like this one, which automatically filter out the si= suffix. They may have decided to address that, then took the opportunity to make their tracking more severe.
It encodes the contents of the search bar.
E.g. for
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw&pp=ygUTZmlyc3QgeW91dHViZSB2aWRlbw%3D%3DygUTZmlyc3QgeW91dHViZSB2aWRlbw==isfirst youtube videoin base64, which is what I typed into the search bar to find that video.Not sure if that’s actually useful for tracking or if there’s another technical reason for it, but at the very least it could accidentally expose your search terms to others if you end up sharing links like that.
that’s interesting. do you perhaps also know what the si param contains?
No, I don’t know. If I had to guess,
simight be short for something like “source identifier” and just contain some unique identifier to track who originally shared a link that others are using.
Oh, that’s how you get it. I just tried it and got the regular si link which doesn’t seem to have valid b64 data.
Since a long time, out of respect for others, I only share YT videos like this: youtube,com/embed/[video_ID]
respect for others
But also yourself. Like this you won’t get grouped by Google with other people online.
gotta chop off the pp
Wasn’t their a Firefox plugin that did this? I recall a while ago to help do the same with Amazon but I never installed it and I don’t remember what it was called…
I think the extension you’re talking about is ClearURL.
Firefox has “copy link without site tracking” built in now
Doesn’t work for
&pp=yet, though. At least, it doesn’t on ESR (and, by extension, Tor Browser and Mullvad Browser).
Thanks for shedding light on this. I’ve also noticed the same thing on Instagram links. They now have a “igsh=” added to track sharing.
What about that youtu.be one
So long as there’s no extra suffix after, it shouldn’t be so bad. So if you have
youtu.be/?v=[video_ID]it’s fine, but if there’s a&si=or&pp=or&anything=, then that’s most likely tracking and should be removed.?is the start of the suffixes,&denotes a change in suffix. Every video has av=suffix to denote the video itself, but everything else isn’t needed.? is the start of the suffixes, & denotes a change in suffix
Technically speaking they are query parameters not suffixes.
Can’t they be both? Potato potahto.
Thank you for the correct terminology though.
Lmfao, this community has automatically removed the si= suffix in my second link. But it didn’t remove the pp= suffix…
