As you may know, the European Union requires websites to ask for consent before transferring data to a third party website. This also applies to you if you serve your website from the outside the EU. ARVE Extra Privacy helps you comply with GDPR / DSGVO without annoying cookie banners, popups or checklists …

This plugin optionally makes it possible to embed videos with without transferring a single byte to or from the video host on page load.

It’s always nice to ask your visitors about third party data transfers, even if you serve outside the EU.

Third Party Content Confirmation#

At this time, this is only supported for Lazyload and Lightbox modes and therefore also requires ARVE Pro.

It shows a text notifying the user that a ARVE privacy enhanced iframe will load 3rd party content from the domain displayed. The message contains a link to your privacy policy, automatically.

Once the user clicks on the thumbnail:

• The notice will disappear from all ARVE embeds that also use the same domain like youtube.com, vimeo.com …
• A cookie will be set to remember the user’s choice on a per-domain basis.

Saigon – 14385

By clicking play, you consent to load content from player.vimeo.com in a privacy enhanced iframe and setting a cookie on this site to store your choice. See Privacy Policy.

Option to cache all thumbnails on your site#

All thumbnails that are usually hot-linked to video hosts will be downloaded and added to your WordPress Media Library and served to visitors from your site directly. With this, it’s possible to have video embeds on your site without any data transferred to from or to the video host without the visitors’ approval.

Replace YouTube embeds with Invidious instance#

This gives additional privacy enhancements when actually clicking on a YouTube embed.

Invidious is an open source project that provides an alternative interface to YouTube without ads and tracking *.

You can use this option without Lazyload (ARVE Pro) but be warned I just tested a 4.2 MB resource transfer for an embed. That is much worse than 1.2 MB normal YouTube has, that is already way too big.

I have no control over Invidious, and can give no guarantees for it working, remain working. Google for sure does not like it.

* Note, public instances do not proxy the actual video steam by default. Just to be perfectly clear, YouTube/Google may very well not actually track this way, but the videos are still streamed from official Google servers so they can, in theory, still track viewers. Just to be 100% honest, because It’s something the Invidious devs are not prominently communicating. To proxy all the YouTube traffic though an instance you need to enable this in settings first and that does not work for many public instances, you may need a private instance.