this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2023
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Privacy

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I wish more people clean URLs before sharing it to others. (lemmy.ml)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by narwhal@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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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

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[–] WarmSoda@lemm.ee 281 points 2 years ago (9 children)

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

[–] StereoTrespasser@lemmy.world 101 points 2 years ago (39 children)

And ironic that OP doesn't share how to clean them.

[–] IronKrill@lemmy.ca 23 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Because it's different for every website.

[–] CoderKat@lemm.ee 16 points 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).

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[–] mo_ztt@lemmy.world 55 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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 35 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

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 16 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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

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[–] otl@lemmy.sdf.org 9 points 2 years 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

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[–] otl@lemmy.sdf.org 99 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

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 :)

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[–] JokeDeity@lemm.ee 49 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

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

[–] Gsus4@feddit.nl 12 points 2 years ago (1 children)

If people were really good at removing that info, they'd probably create a unique hash including all that data that we wouldn't be able to edit.

[–] gothicdecadence@lemm.ee 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I mean, I've seen companies start shortening links with the tracking info inside it. Amazon and Spotify are ones I see frequently

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[–] EddoWagt@feddit.nl 12 points 2 years ago (5 children)

Pretty much all junk which isn't human readable is tracking info

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[–] streetfestival@lemmy.ca 41 points 2 years ago

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

[–] randint@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz 29 points 2 years ago

Agreed. Recently youtube started adding tracking parameters (?si=) to their share links. I always clean them up.

[–] over_clox@lemmy.world 28 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Indeed. I use Léon on Android, very straightforward, open source, and easy to install and configure...

https://github.com/svenjacobs/leon

[–] narwhal@lemmy.ml 25 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Nice. I personally prefer using this one: https://github.com/TrianguloY/UrlChecker

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[–] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 27 points 2 years ago

This would be a good feature add to Lemmy. Clean pre-post.

[–] variants@possumpat.io 19 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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

[–] narwhal@lemmy.ml 19 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Some apps are hiding it behind shortened URLs. So it looks clean, but if you expand it, then oh boy.

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[–] cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 18 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/master/LegitimateURLShortener.txt

Add that to people you know Ublock lists

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[–] CCPIsBased@thelemmy.club 15 points 2 years ago

I wish websites would clean their URLs

[–] FrostyCaveman@lemm.ee 14 points 2 years 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

[–] Clbull@lemmy.world 14 points 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.

[–] Saff@lemmy.ml 14 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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

[–] Synnr@sopuli.xyz 7 points 2 years ago

There is a Firefox plugin which I believe is called CleanURLs.

it's interesting that you mention the shorturls OP... I'm almost positive as of today that those links you can share that are like amazon.com/a/ab3cd4 are customized tracking links.

Problem is, if you paste it in your browser from the app, it doesn't go back to the original URL. You have to search the product again and customize the color, number, etc, and then strip tracking again from the url.

Most people just want to send a friend a link of the thing they think they'll like.

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[–] shortwavesurfer@monero.town 12 points 2 years ago

I try to do it. Mainly i see a lot of ?utm_source shit and kill it.

[–] netchami@sh.itjust.works 12 points 2 years ago (2 children)

On Android, LinkSheet supports cleaning URLs. It's an awesome tool in general.

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[–] Kushan@lemmy.world 12 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I do this because I hate super long URL's, but is this actually a problem for privacy? Does it not actually fuck with the tracking because now two separate people have got the same tracking Params? (Genuine question).

[–] DrM@feddit.de 27 points 2 years ago (7 children)

Nope. It's a nightmare. The ad company now knows that you are friends or family

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[–] Rengoku@lemm.ee 9 points 2 years ago

Filter cleaner should be built into the browser.

[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 8 points 2 years ago

I always remove anything after /ref= from an Amazon link before I forward it to my wife (she has the account and does the orders).

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