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

  • WarmSoda@lemm.ee
    2122·
    2 years ago

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

      • AlexWIWA@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        On YouTube links, delete anything after the ?

        Someone post the next website

        • CoderKat@lemm.eeEnglish
          1·
          2 years 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).

        • WarmSoda@lemm.ee
          1·
          2 years 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

    • mo_ztt ✅@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 years 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.

  • Oliver Lowe@lemmy.sdf.org
    83·
    2 years ago

    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 :)

  • JokeDeity@lemm.eeBanned from community
    522·
    2 years ago

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

  • streetfestival@lemmy.caEnglish
    421·
    2 years ago

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

  • TankieTanuki [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    372·
    2 years 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.

  • sovietknuckles [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    22·
    2 years ago

    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

      • sovietknuckles [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        3·
        2 years ago

        For more tech-savvy users, sure. But I thought you were looking for a way for less technical users to share scrubbed URLs. You’re not going to get the less technical users out there who share URLs to add a URL tracking filter list to uBlock Origin, but getting them to install ClearURLs is within the realm of possibility.

        • narwhal@lemmy.mlOP
          1·
          2 years ago

          I didn’t remember it well, but after checking it again, the list is actually included in the default filter list. It just needed to be activated if it hasn’t. I don’t remember the default behavior.

          https://i.imgur.com/uKmWh0L.jpg

    • lud@lemm.ee
      2·
      2 years ago

      I also use that one, on both my desktop and Android (I use Firefox dev, so I can use whatever addons I want). It does break some sites like banking and unique login URLs and the addon doesn’t have any whitelist feature. So sometimes it goes disabled for a while without me noticing.

      • sovietknuckles [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        Yeah, some high-tracking sites do break, and I’ll need to turn it off temporarily. If ClearUrls breaks a site, it means that the site baked tracking into the functional features of the site itself (which, besides being terrifying, violates GDPR).

        • lud@lemm.ee
          2·
          2 years ago

          It’s not necessarily tracking (for information anyway) though. For example, Plex Desktop app uses unique links to make the login possible via a browser. Some payment breaks because the bank requires an E-ID verification to make bigger purchases, and it happens to do that in a way that looks weird to a dumb add-on.

    • HidingCat@kbin.social
      9·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • N4CHEM@lemmy.ml
        2·
        2 years ago

        You’re both right: most people don’t know what any of this means, but also people who know often don’t care. In my group of friends there are 2 programmers, they perfectly understand this yet they still share links full of trackers in the group chat.

        My strategy is to friendly scold them (a programmer should know better) and in the same message share the same link without tracking rubbish. This way my non-technical friends can also see how short the same link can become.

        • HidingCat@kbin.social
          2·
          2 years ago

          Yea, I do it less for privacy reasons, and more for tidiness. Tracking parameters can be so unwieldly nowadays. Something that’s 30-40 characters long can balloon to 200-300 characters.

    • narwhal@lemmy.mlOP
      2·
      2 years ago

      It’s not just browser though, sharing links from apps also generate these URLs. A lot of people then share these links through chat apps.

      I do realize that most people are not aware of it, that’s why I said this is more of a rant. Just want to vent to fellow privacy minded people.

  • variants@possumpat.ioEnglish
    15·
    2 years ago

    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

  • Saff@lemmy.ml
    15·
    2 years ago

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

  • Clbull@lemmy.world
    14·
    2 years 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.