If you embed YouTube videos in your own blog posts, you may want to remove Google’s invasive tracking to both protect the privacy of your visitors and make your site faster. In this tutorial, we’ll teach you how to embed YouTube videos in a privacy-enhanced way.

Why does YouTube set a tracking cookie?

Google sets a tracking cookie for YouTube videos for marketing and advertising purposes. Because YouTube tracking violates the European Union’s strict GDPR laws, Google was forced to offer a GDPR-compliant alternative which uses no data-collecting HTTP cookies.

Although Apple’s Safari browser is blocking ad trackers by default, YouTube tracking cannot be avoided if you embed videos as you normally would, by linking to them on youtube.com. With a simple change, however, you can get rid of YouTube’s data-collecting HTTP cookie in embeds.

How to remove YouTube tracking

With a few clicks, you can copy a privacy-enhanced embed code that basically links to a privacy-enhanced YouTube URL which ensures no data-collecting cookie is sent.

Open youtube.com in your favorite desktop web browser, like Safari. Start playing a video you’d like to embed in your own posts. Choose the option labeled “Share” underneath the video. Hit "Embed" in the Share popup. Scroll down and tick the box next to “Enable privacy-enhanced mode.” Doing so will change the URL-embed to use the youtube-nocookie.com format.

"Privacy Enhanced Mode allows you to embed YouTube videos without using cookies that track viewing behavior,” according to a support document on the Google website. “This means no activity is collected to personalize the viewing experience."

If you’re not using YouTube’s own embed codes in your own posts, you can also do this manually by changing the domain for the embed URL in your HTML code:
From https://www.youtube.com
To https://www.youtube-nocookie.com