I've found that recently when I visit YouTube, I am automatically logged in with my Google/Gmail Account. I don't like this at all. I do not want my video browsing history tied up with my Google account.
I've disabled third-party cookies in Firefox, but this still happens.
- Log into Gmail.com
- Visit YouTube.com. Shows my username as my Gmail screen name
- Logout on Youtube.com
- Go back to Gmail, logged out there also.
How can I adjust my Firefox settings to avoid this?
Best Answer
I havn't checked the method (and it currently doesn't happen for me, btw. - I'm logged in on GMail, but logged out on YouTube). But third-party cookies aren't necessarily what is happening here. There are other ways, similar to the way OpenID authentication works, or the way Wikipedia (probably) logs you into all of Wikimedia.
Say
youtube.com
embeds an imagegoogle.com/authenticate?id=uniqueid&domain=youtube.com
, then gets a Google-internal callback with your Google identity, to log you in. Or the other way round: when you log into Google, they load an image from YouTube - sayyoutube.com/authenticate?id=uniqueid&source=google.com
, then do an internal callback with the unqiue session ID to retrieve your authentication data and set another regular cookie on theyoutube.com
domain.I don't think you will be able to block this easily, not unless installing a proxy filter that e.g. disables all cookies from youtube.com; using "incognito" mode, or essentially rejecting all cookies from youtube.com in the browser (in the blocked list).