Why you should always use YouTube's Privacy-Enhanced Mode

[AlphaKing]

YouTube launched a new feature on the site recently that it called Privacy-Enhanced Mode. You find the option when you open the embed options on the site to embed video code on third-party websites.

YouTube videos can be embedded on third-party sites like mine directly so that visitors to my site can play the videos without having to click through to YouTube first.

Privacy-Enhanced Mode is a new option that YouTube added to the embed preferences that improves privacy when embedding videos on third-party sites.

When enabled, YouTube won't store information about visitors to pages on your site that have YouTube videos embedded on them unless visitors interact with those videos. Think of it as click-to-play; unless you click, YouTube promises that it won't store information about you.

The mode was added in the wake of the European Union's launch of GDRP, the General Data Protection Regulation, on May 25, 2018.

Default YouTube video embeds set cookies on user systems as soon as they open web pages with embedded YouTube videos. Google may use the cookie to deliver targeted advertisement, add information to the user's profile, or track the user.

YouTube Privacy-Enhanced Mode

Privacy-Enhanced Mode is disabled by default when you open the embed options and needs to be enabled manually.

Here is what happens when you check the box:

The default YouTube embed code without privacy-enhanced mode enabled looks like this:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tYYYciJrfns" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>

The YouTube embed code for videos with privacy-enhanced mode looks like this:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/tYYYciJrfns" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>

The core difference is that YouTube uses a new URL to deliver the video to the site. Instead of using the main domain youtube.com, it uses youtube-nocookie.com.

Whenever you see a video that uses the nocookie domain, it is set up with the privacy-enhanced mode.

Since enabling privacy-enhanced mode for a video is just a change of the URL, it is relatively easy for webmasters to replace all embedded YouTube videos on their sites with the new code as you simply need to replace https://www.youtube.com/embed/ with https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/.

How that is done depends on the site and the technology that you use. If you have access to phpMyAdmin, you could run the following command on the wp_posts table if you use WordPress.

Note: Create a backup of the table before you run the command.

update wp_posts set post_content = replace(
post_content, 'https://www.youtube.com/embed',
'https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed');

You may also want to run the following command if you embedded videos using HTTP instead of HTTPS (usually the case if you started to embed videos many years ago.

update wp_posts set post_content = replace(
post_content, 'http://www.youtube.com/embed',
'https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed');

The embedded video still works afterward and users benefit from this as it blocks YouTube from collecting data unless they interact with the video on the page.