this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2023
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Privacy

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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

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[–] [email protected] 101 points 1 year ago (7 children)

And ironic that OP doesn't share how to clean them.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Because it's different for every website.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

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).

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

On YouTube links, delete anything after the ?

Someone post the next website

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (7 children)

That's terrible advice, you'd just be left with

https://youtube.com/watch

You need the "?v=" and the jumble of letters immediately after.

For example: https://youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago

XcQ, link stays blue

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://piped.video/watch

https://piped.video/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Now that is even better! That is clean! :-D

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

That shit is so annoying and they just started to add it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://piped.video/dQw4w9WgXcQ?si=dwX01vG-EivlOoYe

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I have memorized this link so I know what is rickroll without opening it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

That's terrible advice, [...]

Is it really? It reliably protects people from all the garbage content on youtube.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Wait shit you're right. I'm too used to the mobile links that have the ID after the slash

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

already too much work for normies

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Remove everything after the question mark.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

What would be considered interactive vs static? How would I explain that to someone, for example?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Very helpful, thank you

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Like a YouTube link with a timecode, for example

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Try it on a Google search results page

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

also kinda common sense if you know anything about urls