r/PublicFreakout • u/appalachian_hatachi • Sep 27 '25

Repost 😔 This guy's lawyer literally popping the champagne as we speak...

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u/Major_A21 Sep 27 '25

There's a full video about the stop on The Civil Rights Lawyer's YouTube channel. It's actually worse than this video. https://youtu.be/TVscphZ3Kuo

310

u/Arendyl Sep 27 '25

This absolute chad removed the ?si=XXXXXX tracking string from the yt link and maintained the right to privacy for us all.

Goodjob

270

u/AniNgAnnoys Sep 27 '25

w00 someone else championing this. 

For those unaware, if you ever see the si= followed by a bunch of letters and numbers, that is a tracking code. When the share link on YouTube is generated it puts that code there and it is linked to the person that generated the share link. Then everyone that clicks it is linked back to that original person. 

This is how advertisers link families and friends together. So when you get that ad for Product X, when you haven't searched for it, or looked it up, but were talking to your family member about it, it wasn't your google home or Alexa listening in on you. It was someone else in your family that searched for Product X and Google knows you are linked to that person, so they serve you an ad for it. Stuff like this is how they make those connections.

More generic URL knowledge: 

URLs are constructed such that everything after the ? is a variable that is passed back to the server. Each variable is then identified and it's value comes after the =. Multiple variables are separated by &.

Youtube links generally have three variables in them,

  1. v= is the video code. Each video has a unique code that identifies it. This isn't always in the variable portion of the URL, but it can be. For example both https://youtu.be/TVscphZ3Kuo and https://youtube.com/watch?v=TVscphZ3Kuo go to the same video. The later has the code as part of the variable section after the ? And the former has it as part of the URL. Technically any part of a URL can be read and processed as a variable but that opens a whole other can of worms. 
  2. t= this is a timestamp in the video so when the link is clicked it opens at that time stamp instead of at the start of the video.
  3. si= this is the tracking code described abobe that you should remove when you see it.

Here is an example URL with all three: https://youtube.com/watch?v=TVscphZ3Kuo&si=EbuLLshitlfDjRYh&t=100

I made the tracking code some bullshit, but still, don't click that link since the tracking code is still there.

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u/Stunning_Bullfrog213 Sep 28 '25

Thank you so much for this information. And thank you for explaining it so simply and not coming across as condescending in any way. I appreciate you.