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.

  • lol@discuss.tchncs.de
    10·
    3 hours ago

    It encodes the contents of the search bar.

    E.g. for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw&pp=ygUTZmlyc3QgeW91dHViZSB2aWRlbw%3D%3D

    ygUTZmlyc3QgeW91dHViZSB2aWRlbw== is first youtube video in 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.

    • Saff
      2·
      3 hours ago

      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…

  • TWeaK@lemm.eeOPEnglish
    23·
    7 hours ago

    Lmfao, this community has automatically removed the si= suffix in my second link. But it didn’t remove the pp= suffix…

    Edit: Fixed, finally. It kept trying to convert my links all over the place. They’re not meant to be links, just a clear description of the syntax.

  • ililiililiililiilili@lemm.ee
    141·
    6 hours ago

    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.

  • Zerush
    91·
    6 hours ago

    Since a long time, out of respect for others, I only share YT videos like this: youtube,com/embed/[video_ID]

    • TWeaK@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      4·
      5 hours ago

      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 a v= suffix to denote the video itself, but everything else isn’t needed.