What the hell? Videos on Unity website demand targeting cookies


I’m not the smartest cookie in the box, but can’t Unity just host this content themselves or get another provider? What’s the point in giving cookie options on your site if users can’t view the content without giving up their data anyway?

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I’m sure the answer is simple economics. Cheaper and easier to host where they are doing so than if they self hosted the content. The number of people impacted by the cookie issue is probably extremely low.

Though I’m curious why you’d create an account and post of the Unity forum if you’re so concerned about Unity tracking your usage of their site. Doesn’t make much sense to me.

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One of the main features of a modern browser incognito window is that it blocks tracking cookies. I tried visiting the blog entry where the video you tried to view is located and it’s still playable within the incognito window of both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

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You can consider sharing of personal data to be worth it / make sense for some services and nonsensical for others. Not sure why you’re implying he’s being hypocritical, or how you think that devalues his argument.

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He’s not implying anything of the sort. He’s simply saying it makes no sense to him. I suspect the OP simply doesn’t want companies he doesn’t trust to have access to his data. Unity doesn’t sell data making them a safe company for now.

If I was concerned about being tracked it would be about the third party site that the videos are hosted on, not Unity. It would indeed not make sense to be concerned about what you said.

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Thanks, I know about incognito mode. The point of my post wasn’t to seek workarounds though, it was to draw attention to how illogical it is for Unity to host their videos on an unnamed third party site, effectively forcing you to give your data to an unknown third party. It’s not going to keep me up at night, but a company like Unity can and should handle this a bit better.

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It’s stupid that they require targeting cookies to play a 5 second feature video.

They should fix it.

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Just to be certain we are both looking at the video at the link below, right? Because the play icon in the middle makes it very clear that it’s YouTube. I can’t imagine someone familiar with the concept of a tracking cookie wouldn’t be able to recognize the distinctive icon.

Or are you simply referring to the fact that they don’t tell you who is behind the message that tracking cookies must work?

https://blogs.unity3d.com/2020/07/23/unity-2020-1-is-now-available/

Edit: Okay, I just visited YouTube with all cookies disabled (I was able to confirm it was working by the volume resetting every time I refreshed) and the video played just fine. I’m wondering if the whole tracking nonsense is not YouTube but rather Unity.

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I use uMatrix and I played around with the settings a bit.

I don’t even get the “we need to you enable cookies” popup until I enable geolocation.onetrust.com (which uMatrix automatically blocks for good reason). I just have a blank space.

Is the following link showing a YouTube preview image and play button? Or a blank space?

https://www.youtube.com/embed/yYjqJvd8lQI

On my end the video will still play with all cookies blocked.

6254058--689577--firefox_2020-08-28_08-23-15.jpg

Yup, it’s fine. Cookies blocked, still playing. It’s definitely a thing with Unity, either directly or through one of their third party links.

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This is what’s visible, no play icon:

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Right, you were referring to the fact that it shows a message stating that tracking cookies are required. A message that isn’t accurate in the slightest as shown by the fact that you can go to YouTube with cookies disabled or blocked and still play the video.

In fact I’m willing to bet you can see the video in the spoiler below.

What’s New in Unity 2020.1 - YouTube

I spent some time skimming through the source for the blog post and the source for the YouTube page. Unity’s blog post entry has references to geolocation while YouTube’s page has no references to it that I was able to find.

It’s great that it works when linked directly from youtube, but my issue is that it doesn’t work on Unity’s page without agreeing to targeting cookies.

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Right. That’s solely a Unity thing.
6256338--689910--firefox_2020-08-28_23-20-02.jpg
The only links at the top of the page that don’t have that source are “Get Unity,” “Asset Store,” the forums, and Answers.

I went to a random other blog and found the same behavior.

I looked at the page source for instances of “onetrust.” Found this link.

https://blogs.unity3d.com/wp-content/mu-plugins/blogs-cmp/css/one-trust.css?ver=1.0

If you look near the bottom there’s a whole buncha stuff saying “blocked-video”. So it’s definitely this onetrust.

The only thing I can think of is the whole “this video is not available in your country” thing, but that happens on Youtube’s end. I see no reason for Unity to be blocking video access based on geolocation and other cookies.

Edit: relevant link: https://community.cookiepro.com/s/article/UUID-c5122557-2070-65cb-2612-f2752c0cc4aa
Also:
6256338--689910--firefox_2020-08-28_23-20-02.jpg
That’s the latest blog. You can see that I have every cookie disabled (I’ve also disabled those for Unity itself), but the video is clearly playing. I had to enable that geolocation.onetrust.com, and I had to “enable” targeting cookies–though, again, I’m blocking all cookies.

The only thing I can think of is that they’re seeking consent for something Youtube assumes consent for, and thus blocking the video until you’ve said it’s allowed.

6256338--689913--firefox_2020-08-28_23-48-33.jpg

Doesn’t Unity host all of their videos on YouTube? If you really need to, just go watch the videos on YouTube. Honestly its a better interface for watching most of Unity’s content than Unity’s own website.

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Hey everyone! Sorry you aren’t able to view our content properly.

The blocking overlay is coming from Unity and it has nothing to do with Youtube or any other video hosting platform. It has been implemented due to CCPA and GDPR compliance. We’re aiming to block any Performance, Functional or Targeting scripts and cookies if the visitor does not consent to them and videos hosting platforms trigger their own scripts, thus videos need to be blocked by default.

That said, we are aware of the modern browsers functionality to block third-party cookies, but we’re unable to identify situations when the visitor is using that so we need to consider cases where visitors don’t use that functionality and have not given consent to be tracked.

I hope this helps to clarify things. Happy to answer any other questions regarding this.

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Its weird that no other site has needed to go to such measures. What is special about Unity?

Just curious what the logic was.

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https://www.adrianjock.com/gdpr-embed-youtube-videos/
Has something like this been considered?

Heckuva lot of nonsense at the beginning, but it boils down to changing “youtube.com” to “youtube-nocookie.com”. Just tested it with the video from the blog post in question and it works fine–mostly.


Weird thing is pausing and then resuming the video DOES pop up a few cookies from google.com, though I have no idea what they’re for.