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.
That’s why I always install ClearURLs on my family members computers
Great extension and good recommend
Thank you for the suggestion. Downloaded
deleted by creator
You’re right
deleted by creator
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
removeparam
filters; 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.
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.
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.
If you get them to install ClearUrls in their browser (Firefox, not Firefox), they can copy/paste URLs directly from their URL bar and the URL will be clean with no extra effort.
I keep it enabled in all my browser profiles pretty much always
If you use ublock origin, I find add-ons such as ClearURLs to be no longer necessary.
You can just add url tracking filter like this one maintained by adguard to ublock origin: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AdguardTeam/FiltersRegistry/master/filters/filter_17_TrackParam/filter.txt
For more tech-savvy users, sure. But I thought you were looking for a way for less technical users to share scrubbed URLs. You’re not going to get the less technical users out there who share URLs to add a URL tracking filter list to uBlock Origin, but getting them to install ClearURLs is within the realm of possibility.
I didn’t remember it well, but after checking it again, the list is actually included in the default filter list. It just needed to be activated if it hasn’t. I don’t remember the default behavior.
How do I use this filter?
I just double checked, it should be included in the default filter list.
https://i.imgur.com/uKmWh0L.jpg
You just need to activate it.
For me this doesn’t seem to clean URLs though, it just blocks them and makes me type in the link manually.
Is there a way around this?
I also use that one, on both my desktop and Android (I use Firefox dev, so I can use whatever addons I want). It does break some sites like banking and unique login URLs and the addon doesn’t have any whitelist feature. So sometimes it goes disabled for a while without me noticing.
Yeah, some high-tracking sites do break, and I’ll need to turn it off temporarily. If ClearUrls breaks a site, it means that the site baked tracking into the functional features of the site itself (which, besides being terrifying, violates GDPR).
It’s not necessarily tracking (for information anyway) though. For example, Plex Desktop app uses unique links to make the login possible via a browser. Some payment breaks because the bank requires an E-ID verification to make bigger purchases, and it happens to do that in a way that looks weird to a dumb add-on.
I wish websites would clean their URLs
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 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
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.
Filter cleaner should be built into the browser.
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.
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)
I try to do it. Mainly i see a lot of ?utm_source shit and kill it.
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
Occasionally there will be an id or something in the parameters that breaks the link if it’s absent. I dislike those URLs.