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.
And ironic that OP doesn’t share how to clean them.
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).
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On YouTube links, delete anything after the ?
Someone post the next website
That’s terrible advice, you’d just be left with
You need the “?v=” and the jumble of letters immediately after.
For example: https://youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
They’re talking about the query param that gets added when using the Share button: https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ?si=dwX01vG-EivlOoYe - the ?si=… should be removed.
That shit is so annoying and they just started to add it.
Wait shit you’re right. I’m too used to the mobile links that have the ID after the slash
already too much work for normies
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Remove everything after the question mark.
This may work for sharing links to static content, but it is terrible advice for anything interactive. That removes all URL params and will break lots of interactive sites.
What would be considered interactive vs static? How would I explain that to someone, for example?
Most things you share will be static. These are things like news articles and webcomics where the output of the page is always the same no matter what you do. Things like google searches or YouTube links that are different depending on some way you interact with the site are dynamic. If you search for “apples” in google you’ll get different results than if you search for “oranges.” If you share the apple search with someone, your apple text will be coded as a parameter after the ?. If you strip that off they’d go to google.com and not see any apples. Trackers and other surveillance tools are also captured in the query params so for dynamic content it can be tricky to know which params to remove and which to keep. For static content you can just remove them all because the content doesn’t change based on the params you pass it
Very helpful, thank you
Try it on a Google search results page
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
Look, the point is that I’ve tried explaining it to friends and family and whoever want (and don’t want) to listen.
This post is a rant / wishful thinking as stated as being so, I’m not in the mood of explaining everything again. I’ve done that in my personal blog, etc.
You’re good, no worries. You created a lot of dialog, and most of it is helpful. I’m not complaining.
Thanks. Looking back, maybe I should’ve at least explained about it a little more. At the time I just wanted to blow off some steam.
I could have worded my response better myself.
I’m looking forward to your next rant, tbh
No but that’s what the comments are for. I share if the discussion is relevant.
Don’t worry mate. I’ve never heard the term but I knew exactly what you meant. I cleaned a url earlier today for Lemmy.
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.inb4 you get an indignant reply suggesting that carburetor tuning is a must-have skill for absolutely anyone who owns anything that has one
LOL, wait, is it copypasta or does that guy just post that a lot?
It is now.
That’s why I always install ClearURLs on my family members computers
Great extension and good recommend
Thank you for the suggestion. Downloaded
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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.
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
Indeed. I use Léon on Android, very straightforward, open source, and easy to install and configure…
Nice. I personally prefer using this one: https://github.com/TrianguloY/UrlChecker
This app is awesome, using it and really enjoying it
I would say this is my app do the year
It looks like Lèon is for sharing (outbound) links to others whereas UrlChecker handles shared (inbound) links. Is that right? Or can UrlChecker also scrub a link before I send it?
You can also use LinkSheet.
People barely know what a browser is, you cant expect them to know what an url is, let alone what clearing it is
People generally don’t care (I myself am not at the level of this community). It also involves enough technical know-how that most people won’t care. It’s like asking people to use a CLI, not going to happen. I’m pretty sure I’m one of the few people who still C&P URLs to share, most people hit a “Share” button.
You’re both right: most people don’t know what any of this means, but also people who know often don’t care. In my group of friends there are 2 programmers, they perfectly understand this yet they still share links full of trackers in the group chat.
My strategy is to friendly scold them (a programmer should know better) and in the same message share the same link without tracking rubbish. This way my non-technical friends can also see how short the same link can become.
Yea, I do it less for privacy reasons, and more for tidiness. Tracking parameters can be so unwieldly nowadays. Something that’s 30-40 characters long can balloon to 200-300 characters.
It’s not just browser though, sharing links from apps also generate these URLs. A lot of people then share these links through chat apps.
I do realize that most people are not aware of it, that’s why I said this is more of a rant. Just want to vent to fellow privacy minded people.
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
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 thought I was alone in my windmill-tilting on this one! Nice to see there are others who clean URLs of unnecessary querystring parameters
On Android, LinkSheet supports cleaning URLs. It’s an awesome tool in general.
Urlcheck foss app also do very good work
I wish websites would clean their URLs
I do this because I hate super long URL’s, but is this actually a problem for privacy? Does it not actually fuck with the tracking because now two separate people have got the same tracking Params? (Genuine question).
Nope. It’s a nightmare. The ad company now knows that you are friends or family
But what If you send it via social media like Lemmy or Reddit?
Then they know who’s the poster (you), they can know your username if they want to. A lot of people use the same username in many places, so unless you use different usernames in different social media, it’s still valuable data.
If not that, seeing how the content spreads through social media and analyzing the reach is interesting data by itself.
Then they know that person follows you
I click links on Lemmy all over the place, I don’t follow anyone in particular?
Filter cleaner should be built into the browser.
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Someone just told me about this app an few days ago and I’m loving it!
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).
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