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 never knew users could get the profile from it, I always thought that was a youtube internal thing. thats not cool
It’s a very recent change
i would be surprised if it is true that “If you don’t remove that it shows your personal account to anyone who receives it so that they can chat directly with you”, and a search just now didn’t find anything to substantiate that.is it though? if so, how do you actually find out the profile name from thesiparameter?obviously tracking parameters from URLs should be removed in any case, but afaict only google can use this to find which user generated the link.after some more reading i found conflicting reports but i think this might actually be happening; apparently it is only visible in the app?
I’ve seen it when opening shared links in the browser but it’s possible that you need to be logged in for it to show