I wish more people clean URLs before sharing it to others. - Lemmy
lemmy.mlI 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
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
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I agree completely but most good browsers will automatically filter that stuff out. (Extensions like ClearURL are completely obsolete)
I shall do it, because i hate this URL ads, even more the fucking link shortener, because they disguised it and avoid to see the destination. Because of this i use 2 extension, a Link unshortener, which reveal the real URL, when i click on a shorten link also the Adguardfilter in the Vivaldi’s own trackerblocker, You can find more filters here:
https://filterlists.com
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.
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).
I feel the same, I actually feel weird when someone shares with me a url with tracking or source tags, like bro you’re telling on yourself… do you not care?!
I wish websites would clean their URLs
unfortunately most people don’t know what a url is.
gui was a mistake, or something.
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.
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
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.
Filter cleaner should be built into the browser.
Good reminder, I’d never considered that 😅 So why did lots of reddit subs discourage the use of URL shorteners? Was this just standard Reddit badness?
Because url shorteners can be used to hide affiliate links or even malicious URLs.
I try to do it. Mainly i see a lot of ?utm_source shit and kill it.
Phones and chrome are designed to prevent people from noticing that they’re being tracked and helping big tech track others
does lemmy automatically clean urls?