Please remove the direct YouTube embed from the Excalidraw settings page

[Kovah]

I just recently noticed that my Obsidian fetched a ton of Google-related URLs, including those for Google's advertisement network. After a little research, I found out it's coming from the Excalidraw plugin.

I understand that a short video directly in the settings page may be a pragmatic solution for quickly explaining something. However, in the EU users are protected by the GDPR and direct YouTube embeds without user consent send personal data to Google, which violates GDPR ruling.
Aside from this, the YouTube embed seems to try to show advertisement before the actual video. This violates the Obsidian Developer Policy.

The video might be replaced by a link, or a mechanism to ask for consent should be added.

[Kovah]

YouTube embeds are still present in v2.8.3, now they even appear in the change log.

[Kovah]

Embeds are still prevent in v2.10.1.

[zsviczian]

Sorry, I do not monitor discussions. Next time please open this as an issue. I'll fix the issue.

[zsviczian]

@Kovah, thanks for raising this concern. I’ve now deployed version 2.16.1, which removes the YouTube iframe embed to address the GDPR issue.

For future reference, please open an issue or tag me directly rather than posting in a thread you can clearly see I’m not monitoring, or escalating to the Obsidian devs. As you can see from the issue tracker, I actively maintain Excalidraw and typically respond to issues within a few days — but it’s a one-person hobby project with limited bandwidth. I rarely engage in discussions simply because of time constraints, so a direct ping would have resolved this much faster.

I appreciate your vigilance on privacy matters — it helps keep the plugin better for everyone.

P.S. Interestingly, removing the iframes improved performance, and after a bit of research I learned it’s also better for YouTube stats — so this turned out to be a win all around.