When you share a YouTube video using the share button it adds “si=some_unique_code” to the URL. If you don’t remove that it shows your personal account to anyone who receives it so that they can chat directly with you. For a lot of people this is their real name.
I’ve seen it all over Lemmy so I figured I’d mention it here! You only need the stuff before the question mark in the URL to let others see the video.
This can also be turned off in your YouTube settings under the privacy section. The setting is “channel visibility for shared links”. It will still add the si code for tracking though.
I remember telling this to people on reddit and getting downvoted to oblivion while redditors squawked “who tf cares bro”
We set up a bot on r/asmr to reply to anyone posting a YouTube link containing the “si=” parameter, warning that it was likely a tracking ID that Google could potentially use to tie their YouTube account to their Reddit account with some degree of probability and suggesting that they delete their post and re-post without the si= parameter. Many were grateful for the warning and info but some didn’t care. We decided to disable the warning after a few weeks.
why did you disable the warning?
fitting
I first heard about it on reddit but it was before the API exodus, so…