I see a lot of people, including friends and family, sharing URLs rife with tracking parameters.
I feel alone in making sure that I’m sharing the cleanest possible URLs to others. For example, checking if the URLs are shortened to hide plenty of tracking params.
Just need to vent, thanks for reading.
Edit: adding some context for future references.
By using url tracking params, tech companies can track who shares the content and who clicks on that specific shared urls. A simple but effective tracking method.
Try sharing Instagram post or YouTube video from the apps.
Instagram adds ‘igshid=’ . YouTube adds ‘si=’.
If you share the same IG or YouTube content from different accounts. The ‘igshid’, ‘si’ value will be different.
This can be used to tag who shares it, and who clicks on that specific url param value.
TikTok hides a ton of such params behind shortened url. Try expanding tiktok shared urls.
If you use android, use this app to expand, analyze and clean up urls https://github.com/TrianguloY/UrlChecker
If you use Firefox (you should), install ublock origin and add this url tracking filter maintained by adguard: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AdguardTeam/FiltersRegistry/master/filters/filter_17_TrackParam/filter.txt
Friends and family don’t know what cleaning a URL means. Nobody does.
They don’t necessarily need to; hopefully we can help people install uBlock Origin which removes tracking query parameters from URLs. See privacy.txt
And ironic that OP doesn’t share how to clean them.
Because I don’t expect the target audience to be here in /c/privacy
You don’t think anyone is here to learn how to be more private on the Internet? You just expect everyone to already know everything
Because it’s different for every website.
There’s a lot of common patterns, but you have to understand how URLs work. You have to recognize which URL parameters are tracking ones or even just might be tracking. And that means you have to know how they work and that takes a moment.
In brief, URL parameters start after a ? in the URL and are formatted like key1=values&key2=value2. You can’t usually remove all parameters because not all are tracking. To further complicate things, URLs can also have an anchor starting with a # character which will be after the URL parameters. You often don’t want to remove that (though theoretically the anchor could in fact contain tracking details).
It’s often trial and error to see which parameters you can remove. I do this a lot since I write a lot of technical documentation. Clean URLs make the documentation more compact and less likely to break. It’s not just tracking stuff, but sometimes you need to remove temporal data that makes a page display data from a specific time when you want it to just default to the current time (etc).
I had someone watch me edit a URL in the address bar and she clearly thought I was just fucking around, because there was no possible way that any human could edit the Matrix language up there and accomplish anything productive.
That’s part of my point. Most people just don’t know.
That’s like telling someone to just tune their carburator.I mean carburetor tuning is a must-have skill for absolutely anyone who has one. Otherwise you can never be sure that you are getting an ideal fuel-air mixture, and the ratio changes over time with the temperature, humidity, seasons, etc. Really, it’s irresponsible to not know how to do this if you have a car with a carburetor.
That’s why I always install ClearURLs on my family members computers
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You’re right
To be honest 99% of people, certainly including me, probably don’t recognize tracking elements in a URL unless they’re like affiliate links.
Pretty much all junk which isn’t human readable is tracking info
Hard to follow that as a rule. Consider any YouTube video, the video id isn’t exactly human readable.
Actually it’s pretty easy. While not necessarily universally true, 98% of the time if there is a question mark everything after it is completely useless and can be removed.
for example of youtube, if you just use the share link from mobile you will get something like this
https://youtu.be/NMGQnFr0wMI?si=wcY56UThMAL6qkeg
However the only thing needed is
discord is similar, share a picture and you get shit like
but all that’s needed is
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/425755272191934466/1160245184110526586/1696478537347025.png
the ? is almost always used as an escape from the actual url. So if you see a question mark, Just remove everything after it and things will most likely still work.
This holds true for youtu.be links, but not youtube.com/watch?v=
Discord file url parameters are to prevent using discord as a free cdn. I believe discord plans on actually enforcing expiration later this year or early next year, at which point those extra url parameters will actually be necessary (and the links will no longer work indefinitely)
By the way for anyone who doesn’t know, the ? only appears once in the url. Successive question marks are instead denoted by &
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/NMGQnFr0wMI?si=wcY56UThMAL6qkeg
https://piped.video/NMGQnFr0wMI
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Yeah it doesn’t work for every website, but it’s an okay starting point
If people were really good at removing that info, they’d probably create a unique hash including all that data that we wouldn’t be able to edit.
I mean, I’ve seen companies start shortening links with the tracking info inside it. Amazon and Spotify are ones I see frequently
There it is :/
I’m aware that with most privacy issues, a lot of people have limited understanding about it. Hell, I’m probably ignorant on many other privacy issues outside of this topic.
Phones and chrome are designed to prevent people from noticing that they’re being tracked and helping big tech track others
Agreed. Recently youtube started adding tracking parameters (
?si=) to their share links. I always clean them up.I wish websites would clean their URLs
Thankfully uBlock Origin removes those parameters for us. The default filters include a whole bunch of
removeparamfilters; e.g. privacy.txt See also removeparam.Maybe you could help your friends and family install Firefox and/or uBlock Origin? Every little bit helps :)
The OCD part of me really wants to clean up those URLs simply because the link becomes a massive novella of garbage that’s harder to read than Yu-Gi-Oh card text.
Filter cleaner should be built into the browser.
unfortunately most people don’t know what a url is.
gui was a mistake, or something.
I always remove anything after /ref= from an Amazon link before I forward it to my wife (she has the account and does the orders).
This would be a good feature add to Lemmy. Clean pre-post.
It’s not just safer, they’re nicer to look at too. I hate seeing a 20 character URL followed by a
?and 200 characters.Edit:
product links are a major offender here.Every website these days will just hijack any link posted on their service and there’s not a whole lot you can do other than just physically typing in the intended address character by character. No one wants to do that. No one cares. And these platforms know that. That’s why they do it 🖕
I mean it takes 10 secs to hold the back key though and get rid of it
Anything after the question mark in a URL gets deleted before I share it. Screw trackers
Does that do the trick?
theoretically it should, everything after the ? is literally just tracking shit and parameters, everything before is purely navigation stuff
That’s really interesting. Thanks. I never knew this.
If you want to share an opensearch search, it may say something like “https://searchengine.xyz/search?q=how+to+get+a+roblox+girlfriend” in which case it is just the query, but that is generally correct.
I care about this also. I used to clean them up, but what I’ve started doing is adding and replacing parts of the share id. And I’ll usually put something stupid in there like “booger”, just to screw up their tracking data.
