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
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 :)
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.
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
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.
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.
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 wish websites would clean their URLs
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
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?
I wouldn’t go as far as to say that once two people have clicked on the same tracking link the company behind it can tell what your relation is directly. What they will know is that the two or more people are connected in some way, to then infer in what way, they need other circumstantial data, maybe they have an account on that website and they share the surname or, even easier, without account they can tell that the requests came from IPs that come from a circumscribed area, and on and on, the more data points you add the better predictions the company can make.
If several IPs from disparate places in the world use the same link they can probably tell that the link was shared on social media, not knowing which one, but it was sent in a public internet space at least
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.
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
Removed by mod
Someone just told me about this app an few days ago and I’m loving it!
On Android, LinkSheet supports cleaning URLs. It’s an awesome tool in general.
Urlcheck foss app also do very good work
Is it me or that feature make the the startup time unbearably slow? After I got tired of waiting seconds the app to show me the link opening options I just disabled that ajd keep URL check on the side for when I see the link is riddled with useless parameters (or even worse URLs inside URLs)
