Up until like a year or two ago, YouTube links always used to be pretty clean. The format was youtube .com/watch?v=[video_ID]. A year or two ago, they started adding a tracking suffix on, so it would be youtube .com/watch?v=[video_ID] &si=[tracking_ID].
Over the last day or so, I’ve noticed links with a different format, youtube .com/watch?v=[video_ID]&pp=[tracking_ID] - only the pp= string is much longer than the si= string. This can only be because they’re including more information in it. What that information is is anyone’s guess.
This is basically a PSA to watch YouTube links more carefully, as people are by and large complacent with them (moreso than other links) and never even realised the si= change, let alone this new pp= change.
It could also be that the change to pp= is meant to circumvent communities, like this one, which automatically filter out the si= suffix. They may have decided to address that, then took the opportunity to make their tracking more severe.
So long as there’s no extra suffix after, it shouldn’t be so bad. So if you have
youtu.be/?v=[video_ID]it’s fine, but if there’s a&si=or&pp=or&anything=, then that’s most likely tracking and should be removed.?is the start of the suffixes,&denotes a change in suffix. Every video has av=suffix to denote the video itself, but everything else isn’t needed.Technically speaking they are query parameters not suffixes.