Yes, some websites use this data to track you in order to put ads in front of you, but
that is just not on our list of things to do.
Othram took over management of Websleuths precisely because we saw the value of the platform and thought that running it with ads was a terrible user-experience. We believed that WS users appreciated the site enough that we'd be able to pay for it through donations (Websleuths Guardians and tips), through merch sales (coming soon), and / or by driving Websleuths users to activate through promotions of the America's Crime Lab podcast and the Othram app.
Selling your eyeballs to Google for ads is not interesting to us. Here's literally everything I do with our Google Analytics:
- Track user-growth
- See where traffic is coming from (so we can find more people to visit)
- See if any of my UX changes to the site are helping or hurting.
- Identify any areas of the site that aren't being used at all and find out why.
- Identify any areas of the site that are being used the most and focus on making it better.
Regarding embedded youtube videos, YouTube's embedding code works if they can attach cookies to the embedded video. If you block those cookies, the embeds weren't supposed to work. Once I enabled the new cookie-banner, and gave you the power to refuse those cookies, the embed stops working as designed. However, Google and YouTube aren't stupid – they still want you to watch their videos, so they gave us a workaround. XenForo - the company that makes the forum software - has a bug in their code that prevents that.
I'm still working on a fix for that. I'm sorry it's a pain-in-the-tail, but I am working on it.