Earlier today I came across a Reddit comment with a link to an Instagram post. The link had ?igsh= at the end.
When I clicked on the link, I got this popup. It had a name and profile photo that was different from that of the post being shared.
Join Firstname Lastname on Instagram
See photos, videos, and more from Firstname Lastname.
[ Open Instagram ]
not now
I avoid link trackers. However, I did not realize it was this bad.
To my knowledge, TikTok does the same thing and lists the name of the person that shared the link. Assuming this increases engagement, any website could enable such a feature, even on old links that you shared in the past.
You should manually remove any trackers before sharing, or use an app for it.
Firefox has an option called copy link without trackers on their desktop version which covers a lot of this.
It doesn’t cover YouTube link trackers :/
I use an extension that handles A LOT of these unneeded parameters for me on desktop FF, and on Android i use an app that does some processing on URLs, among it cleaning URLs, as my default browser so it gets to URLs before i open any. This saves me some manual handling.
Yeah I was surprised about it. That tracking parameter is one that I notice the most and almost everyone includes it. It made me think that feature is either broken, or in misunderstanding what it supposed to do.
It does remove
?feature=sharedand?si=...fromyoutu.belinks. Maybe not fromyoutube.comlinks, though I’m not sure how people get those in the first place.Safari too, part of default tracking prevention, though both browsers miss a lot of tracker types, so extensions are still needed to handle the rest.