Wow, this is terrifying. I am a big supported of Google and dislike the recent attacks on FAANG, but this is shocking to me. If they are exempting themselves from this, what else could they be doing?!
The comment implies that this is somehow hardcoded just for Google sites, which is not true. Autoplay is allowed for sites with a high enough media engagement index. You can check chrome://media-engagement.
The media engagement index is based on a user's past activity on a site, but Chrome has a special list of "preloaded" sites that are allowed to autoplay video even without any prior media engagement.
One has to wonder whether they intentionally obfuscate this list. It sounds like they “trained” a browser, and captured the resulting state. I’m sure you can argue this makes things more fair (we trained it using real world behavior!), but I really can’t give them the benefit of the doubt anymore.
It's generated by a Python script [0] from a list of URLs, but the input list doesn't seem to be included in the Chromium source (only the binary output of this tool).
> The pre-seeded site list is generated based on the global percentage of site visitors who train Chrome to allow autoplay for that site; a site will be included on the list if a sizable majority of site visitors permit autoplay on it. The list is algorithmically generated, rather than manually curated, and with no minimum traffic requirement. With the implementation of the autoplay policy for Web Audio in M71, Web Audio playback is also included in calculating the MEI score for a given site.
Will this not have some kind of self-reinforcing behavior, as the measurements are biased towards sites that are currently unmuted by default?
According to the MEI it actively measures user behavior and one of the most important measures is that a video is unmuted. From the document:
“The MEI is meant to allow media heavy websites (e.g. YouTube, Netflix) that rely on autoplay for their core experience. It is a non-goal to allow websites with a “good media behaviour” to autoplay without restrictions”
It doesn’t sound too good, and still doesn’t really explain how everything is seeded.
Amazing. I once built a web app with autoplay, which worked for me, probably because I was using the app a lot which gave it high media engagement, but didn't work for others, and I never figured out the problem until now.
