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
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.
Friends and family don’t know what cleaning a URL means. Nobody does.
I wish websites would clean their URLs
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).
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 :)
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
To be honest 99% of people, certainly including me, probably don’t recognize tracking elements in a URL unless they’re like affiliate links.
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 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:
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.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.
I agree completely but most good browsers will automatically filter that stuff out. (Extensions like ClearURL are completely obsolete)
unfortunately most people don’t know what a url is.
gui was a mistake, or something.
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.
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
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.
