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

        • @[email protected]English
          16•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]
          22•1 year ago

          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•1 year ago

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

            • @[email protected]
              13•1 year ago

              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]
                0•1 year ago

                If your url for a single item is a paragraph long - often repeating itself - and including shit that can be handled by css that is absolutely shit code. Temu is a particularly batshit example of this.

                  • @[email protected]
                    1•1 year ago

                    Ok but why are we pretending that’s what people are sharing? We’re talking about stripping garbage out of URLS when c&p. People are sharing static links - purchasable items, a funny video or a meme - if these links break when you remove additional constructs, then what the hell are you doing?

        • @[email protected]
          30•1 year ago

          You don’t think anyone is here to learn how to be more private on the Internet? You just expect everyone to already know everything

          • @[email protected]OP
            5•1 year ago

            Look, the point is that I’ve tried explaining it to friends and family and whoever want (and don’t want) to listen.

            This post is a rant / wishful thinking as stated as being so, I’m not in the mood of explaining everything again. I’ve done that in my personal blog, etc.

            • @Chunk
              1•1 year ago

              Don’t worry mate. I’ve never heard the term but I knew exactly what you meant. I cleaned a url earlier today for Lemmy.

    • mo_ztt ✅English
      54•1 year ago

      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•1 year ago

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

        • @[email protected]English
          16•1 year ago

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

          • @[email protected]
            9•1 year ago

            Brake line bleeding is a must-have skill for anyone with brakes. Otherwise you can never be sure not to have air in the brake lines. Really it’s irresponsible not to know how to do this if you have a vehicle with idraulic brakes.

            • @psud
              3•1 year ago

              Or you can get your mechanic to do it. It’s not like brakes get air bubbles during normal operation, it’s only a risk when working on the brakes in any other way

              (Was your comment a poke at the previous one, pointing out that one doesn’t really need those skills? If so I think it’s reasonable for a person with a carburettor vehicle to learn how to tune it, as the skills are becoming rare)

              • @[email protected]
                11•1 year ago

                Being able to adjust your sarcasm detector is a must-have skill. Sarcasm levels fluctuate wildly depending on platform, community, season, and topic. Otherwise you can never know if you’re making an ass of yourself when replying to other comments. Really, it’s irresponsible to partake in social media without a finely tuned sarcasm detector.

                • @psud
                  2•1 year ago

                  I take it you missed my bracketed comment acknowledging it was probably sarcastic.

    • Oliver Lowe
      6•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