cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/31187638

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.

    • Ephera
      11•2 months ago

      The problem is that these parameters can also do useful things, i.e. removing them might break the link. There’s no inherent criteria to determine whether a parameter is used for tracking or not.

      The way these extensions or Firefox’ built-in feature works, is that they check for ‘well-known’ parameters. For example, lots of URLs contain parameters starting with utm_, which is from Google Analytics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTM_parameters

      As such, it’s for example unlikely that someone would build a website which uses a parameter utm_medium with a value of social, without it being used for tracking, so that gets removed.
      But if someone builds a website that puts your full name into a parameter called potato, there’s just no way to automatically detect and remove that.