You may have noticed that some of your youtube links are a bit longer than you’ve seen before.
https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ?si=4xDc5_c39H5gZEqM
Here’s whats going on. Google along with other companies have figured out a way to track resource sharing outside of their platform. That number at the end is sent back along with reference data courtesy of your browser in the form of user-agents and http reference fields. So they can reliably with a little guess-work find what computer accessed that resource.
For example: here are some source ids i’ve collected from my friends discord server over the last month
Youtube
?si=wJ0BawHIBjyA_2Oe
?si=3SbRGhjV336mhBcG
?si=tmKvmvaUOG2nh0D-
?si=Hc37xOJKkaHFKc2h
?si=H07IPxKs3ZS2vfPX
?si=ObkO56m7UbK75y98
?si=e0aYIKVJiLnYtNlA
?si=idwT1a5EiRJgK6ma
?si=nLJZO29DojLjgn0n
?si=O0DVwzNVkulrQULx
?si=blxECajnrvrERpnO
?si=rcgwx7jXnjuzHkPW
?si=jT0ifUb4tGOS_vyH
?si=fdfuTHhtauL_RBnJ
?si=jA5AH66plTBVvZdX
?si=gQ2NdY5F2TRF9Nbo
?si=z2ruBKeFCs9th7gw
?si=UNpKQgnmnu9AKAgvSpotify
?si=d84e4e601b184040not necessary
only on share links
?? only on shortened links (not)
started in august 2023 (a)
Posted in an incompleate state
More to come.
Click to expand image
Click to expand image
(a) https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/15ukrpi/what_is_the_si_parameter_in_a_youtube_share_link/
F:(post date aug 18, 2023)
SOURCE IDENTIFIER