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
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    1 year ago

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

        • CoderKat@lemm.ee
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          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).

      • AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        On YouTube links, delete anything after the ?

        Someone post the next website

        • originalfrozenbanana@lemm.ee
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          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.

          • WarmSoda@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

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

            • originalfrozenbanana@lemm.ee
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              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

      • narwhal@lemmy.mlOP
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        1 year ago

        Because I don’t expect the target audience to be here in /c/privacy

        • WarmSoda@lemm.ee
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          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

          • narwhal@lemmy.mlOP
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            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.

          • narwhal@lemmy.mlOP
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            1 year ago

            No but that’s what the comments are for. I share if the discussion is relevant.

            • Chunk@lemmy.world
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              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 ✅@lemmy.world
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      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.

      • WarmSoda@lemm.ee
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        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.

        • pixelscript@lemmy.ml
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          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

        • Butt Pirate@reddthat.com
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          I mean carburetor tuning is a must-have skill for absolutely anyone who has one. Otherwise you can never be sure that you are getting an ideal fuel-air mixture, and the ratio changes over time with the temperature, humidity, seasons, etc. Really, it’s irresponsible to not know how to do this if you have a car with a carburetor.

          • Damage@slrpnk.net
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            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@lemmy.world
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              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)

              • _cnt0@unilem.org
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                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@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

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

  • Oliver Lowe@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year 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.ee
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    1 year 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.ca
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    1 year 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.net
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    1 year 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.

  • variants@possumpat.io
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    1 year 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

  • Mandy@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    People barely know what a browser is, you cant expect them to know what an url is, let alone what clearing it is

    • HidingCat@kbin.social
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      1 year 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
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        1 year 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
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          1 year 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
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      1 year 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.

      • sovietknuckles [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 year 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
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          1 year 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
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      1 year 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 [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 year 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
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          1 year 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.

  • Saff@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

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

  • FrostyCaveman@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I thought I was alone in my windmill-tilting on this one! Nice to see there are others who clean URLs of unnecessary querystring parameters