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The White House has quietly ditched YouTube as its provider-of-choice for embedded videos on President Obama‘s official website.

With the release of this week’s video address, the White House has started using a Flash-enabled video player based on the Akamai network.

The White House made the move in response to concerns voiced by privacy advocates over YouTube‘s collection fo user data.

From the “a little too ironic?” department, the White House has made this change literally days after YouTube began rolling out a new privacy policy to better protect its users who view embedded videos on Federal websites.

YouTube has recently modified their cookie policy for embedded videos, adding “delayed cookies,” which effectively means that

“…the YouTube video player will not set any non-session cookies on the computer of a visitor (viewing the page on which the YouTube video is embedded). The YouTube video player may set non-session cookies on the visitor’s computer once the visitor clicks on the YouTube video player.”

So what do you think? Was this a good move on the part of the White House? Does Google need to keep its thirst for user data in check?

Here is this week’s video from President Obama:

UPDATE: The White House now denies that it is moving away from YouTube.  The change was nothing more than an experiment, says White House spokesman Nick Shapiro:

“As the president continues his goal of making government more accessible and transparent, this week we tested a new way of presenting the Ppresident’s weekly address by using a player developed in-house,” Mr. Shapiro said in a statement. “This decision is more about better understanding our internal capabilities than it is a position on third-party solutions or a policy. The weekly address was also published in third-party video hosting communities and we will likely continue to embed videos from these services on WhiteHouse.gov in the future.”

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