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.
(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