Firefox I believe does. If you right click on a link, it says something like “copy link without tracking”. It should do away with queries in the URL, but I’m not completely sure.
This is definitely what it’s supposed to do (and a great feature) but unfortunately it doesn’t work that well. Have tried this many times, especially with Amazon links, and it seems to be a bit inconsistent in its effectiveness.
Yeah, I cannot imagine any reason they wouldn’t use cookies to track this. The moment you arrive via an affiliate link they’re going to know that that’s how you got to the site for that session.
Oh nice, that is pretty new, but will have to see if it works on those gumroad links. I have an offline script (not a browser extension, I haven’t bothered figuring out how to write those) that edits urls to remove tracking and it’s quite a pain, since there are dozens of sites and tracking schemes it has to know about. Also, rather than creating a pasteable url, a suitable browser extension should just rewrite the link automatically before navitation when you click on it.
Hmm, I thought ublock origin could only block links, not rewrite them. Am I missing something? I just looked through the docs and only see block/allow/noop rules, and I remember reading something a while back about how the devs didn’t want to rewrite. I’d love to have a pointer to the docs about how to do this if I’m wrong. Thanks ;)
For those of you with Apple devices, I’m pretty sure current versions of Mac OS and iOS remove tracking arguments from URLs when you use cut/copy/paste/share.
We need browser extensions to kill those tags automatically.
Firefox I believe does. If you right click on a link, it says something like “copy link without tracking”. It should do away with queries in the URL, but I’m not completely sure.
https://www.trishtech.com/2024/10/how-to-disable-copy-link-without-site-tracking-in-firefox/
This is definitely what it’s supposed to do (and a great feature) but unfortunately it doesn’t work that well. Have tried this many times, especially with Amazon links, and it seems to be a bit inconsistent in its effectiveness.
If a platform gets traction and is good at removing them, then links will be more obfuscated to deal with it.
You probably also need to clear your cookies as well. I can’t really see this being done only via GET
Yeah, I cannot imagine any reason they wouldn’t use cookies to track this. The moment you arrive via an affiliate link they’re going to know that that’s how you got to the site for that session.
That’s not going to work for links sent by text or whatever.
I don’t understand. Cookies and request method are two different things. You can set cookies on GET.
Good to know.
Oh nice, that is pretty new, but will have to see if it works on those gumroad links. I have an offline script (not a browser extension, I haven’t bothered figuring out how to write those) that edits urls to remove tracking and it’s quite a pain, since there are dozens of sites and tracking schemes it has to know about. Also, rather than creating a pasteable url, a suitable browser extension should just rewrite the link automatically before navitation when you click on it.
uBlock Origin filter or ClearURLs for example.
In the case of uBO, just search for “url” in the filter list and you should find it.
The URL tracking filter list is nice but it doesn’t seems to include anything related to gumroad domain or parameters.
https://filters.adtidy.org/extension/ublock/filters/17.txt
You need to add it yourself.
An uBlock Origin custom filtrer should do.
Hmm, I thought ublock origin could only block links, not rewrite them. Am I missing something? I just looked through the docs and only see block/allow/noop rules, and I remember reading something a while back about how the devs didn’t want to rewrite. I’d love to have a pointer to the docs about how to do this if I’m wrong. Thanks ;)
Added: https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/b9tdky/rule_for_redirecting_urls_to_cleaner_ones/ points to some github issues related to this.
Use removeparam.
The URL tracking protection filter list uses this and is a nice list to enable.
Thanks! I saw the GH issue about that but didn’t figure out that it had been deployed.
For those of you with Apple devices, I’m pretty sure current versions of Mac OS and iOS remove tracking arguments from URLs when you use cut/copy/paste/share.
https://9to5mac.com/2023/06/08/ios-17-link-tracking-protection/
This is about removing tracking arguments that identify users, this is not the case here.
The example in your link even show it’s keeping campaign tracking arguments. So I’m pretty sure it would keep the one we are talking about here.