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
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 :)
As long as they don’t link them to those links, thereby confusing them to the point of being completely turned off to the idea
To be honest 99% of people, certainly including me, probably don’t recognize tracking elements in a URL unless they’re like affiliate links.
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 :/
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.
Yeah it doesn’t work for every website, but it’s an okay starting point
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.This would be a good feature add to Lemmy. Clean pre-post.
Yeah I always mention it when people send a link with all the extra stuff, how you can usually delete everything past the question mark
Some apps are hiding it behind shortened URLs. So it looks clean, but if you expand it, then oh boy.
Yeah I hate that I never trusted shortened urls
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/master/LegitimateURLShortener.txt
Add that to people you know Ublock lists
You know it’s legit because it’s in the name!
I try to do it. Mainly i see a lot of ?utm_source shit and kill it.
Interesting, I never really thought about this before. I wonder if there’s a clipboard manager that does this automatically?
There is a Firefox plugin which I believe is called CleanURLs.
it’s interesting that you mention the shorturls OP… I’m almost positive as of today that those links you can share that are like amazon.com/a/ab3cd4 are customized tracking links.
Problem is, if you paste it in your browser from the app, it doesn’t go back to the original URL. You have to search the product again and customize the color, number, etc, and then strip tracking again from the url.
Most people just want to send a friend a link of the thing they think they’ll like.
For android, I use this: https://github.com/TrianguloY/UrlChecker
For firefox, I use ublock origin and add then anti url tracking list. Adguard maintains such a list. I forgot the exact name though.
Edit: it’s this one https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AdguardTeam/FiltersRegistry/master/filters/filter_17_TrackParam/filter.txt
I thought I was alone in my windmill-tilting on this one! Nice to see there are others who clean URLs of unnecessary querystring parameters
- Rengoku ( @Rengoku@lemm.ee ) 5•1 year ago
Filter cleaner should be built into the browser.
Brave includes “copy clean link” in the context menu in the desktop version.
Amen.
