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] 282 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Friends and family don't know what cleaning a URL means. Nobody does.

[–] [email protected] 101 points 1 year ago (43 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).

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[–] [email protected] 54 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

That's part of my point. Most people just don't know.
That's like telling someone to just tune their carburator.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

inb4 you get an indignant reply suggesting that carburetor tuning is a must-have skill for absolutely anyone who owns anything that has one

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

They don't necessarily need to; hopefully we can help people install uBlock Origin which removes tracking query parameters from URLs. See privacy.txt

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[–] [email protected] 101 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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 :)

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

To be honest 99% of people, certainly including me, probably don't recognize tracking elements in a URL unless they're like affiliate links.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Pretty much all junk which isn't human readable is tracking info

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago

Phones and chrome are designed to prevent people from noticing that they're being tracked and helping big tech track others

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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: lord-bezos-amused product links are a major offender here.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Indeed. I use Léon on Android, very straightforward, open source, and easy to install and configure...

https://github.com/svenjacobs/leon

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (4 children)
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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago

Agreed. Recently youtube started adding tracking parameters (?si=) to their share links. I always clean them up.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago

This would be a good feature add to Lemmy. Clean pre-post.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

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

Some apps are hiding it behind shortened URLs. So it looks clean, but if you expand it, then oh boy.

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

People barely know what a browser is, you cant expect them to know what an url is, let alone what clearing it is

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (9 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Interesting, I never really thought about this before. I wonder if there’s a clipboard manager that does this automatically?

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

I wish websites would clean their URLs

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

I try to do it. Mainly i see a lot of ?utm_source shit and kill it.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

On Android, LinkSheet supports cleaning URLs. It's an awesome tool in general.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Nope. It's a nightmare. The ad company now knows that you are friends or family

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Filter cleaner should be built into the browser.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

unfortunately most people don't know what a url is.

gui was a mistake, or something.

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