Please accept this in the ethos of no stupid questions.

The only programming I do is to defy tracking by deleting hash lines after ? In the url.

Some popular sites I am embarrassed to admit to even viewing have found a way around this by offering me share links without the ?.

It’s Instagram I am ashamed to mention.

What do I do to get rid of the tracking now?

  • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    With TikTok, if you copy and paste the URL into a browser you will get a link you can then copy and paste without the baked-in tracking. You can probably do the same with Instagram, but I just got a link from them and they had the tracking under a query parameter (that’s the technical term for the stuff after the question mark). So I’m not sure what you’re seeing.

    Also, thank you for stripping tracking data off of links you share. “It ain’t much, but it’s honest work!”

    https://www.tiktok.com/t/aaaa becomes https://www.tiktok.com/@someuser/video/111 (manually remove tracking as before). I assume this might work with Instagram, but like I said, when I try it, it doesn’t actually give me that style URL.

      • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
        2·
        5 hours ago

        Query parameters follow everything after the ? and take the format a=foo&b=bar. Essentially, key value pairs using = and separated by &.

        There’s no perfect way to know what is and isn’t part of a tracking stuff. We just use our intuition. In this case, when we look at a YouTube video we see links like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ. Notice the v=xxx? So, in the URL you shared, we can deduce that v=W_svsNc6seE is needed and the si=xxx is the tracking stuff. You should also then remove the & because it’s no longer separating two entries. Leaving it doesn’t seem to hurt anything though. So https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=W_svsNc6seE without &si=22MYOxMc5wMcdatU.

        I don’t know what si stands for, but in my head I see it as “share ID”. A lot of services use si or something similar for the tracking stuff.

        • pleasehavemylyrics@lemmy.worldOP
          1·
          4 hours ago

          Thanks very much.

          I shall experiment with your models and hopefully learn a little bit more about this.

          Would you say that these platforms are trying to make it harder for dabblers like me to defeat some of their tracking?

          • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
            1·
            4 hours ago

            Yeah. TikTok’s generated share links don’t have separate params for the content and tracking making it difficult to get around without copying the link into the browser yourself. Because it’s mostly used through an app and not the browser, you cannot just copy the URL and you have to use the share button.