Also in the News: White House tries new approach with YouTube
Editor's note: The Obama administration has not changed its online video policy, according to Bev Godwin, director of USA.gov, speaking at the Information Processing Interagency Conference in Orlando. The administration continues to post videos to YouTube on its own White House channel. The reason videos disappeared from Whitehouse.gov is because they were "experimenting with the way they embed videos" from YouTube, said Godwin, who is currently detailed to the White House.
With complaints by privacy activists stacking up, the White House has quietly dropped YouTube as the supplier of embedded videos on the White House home page, according to CNET news.
Instead, the Obama administration will use its own Flash-based solution. The decision came following growing criticism of Google-owned YouTube's use of tracking cookies.
The White House counsel recently issued a waiver to the long-held no-cookie presumption of privacy for visitors to the White House Web site, a decision challenged by privacy groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Obama’s technology team, widely praised for running the most technologically advanced presidential campaign in history, is finding it more difficult to adapt the model to government, according to the Washington Post. The bureaucracy surrounding security and privacy rules is only one of the problems.
The new White House video solution, which appears to use Akamai’s content delivery network, does not make use of tracking cookies, CNET said.