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 :)
To be honest 99% of people, certainly including me, probably don't recognize tracking elements in a URL unless they're like affiliate links.
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.
I mean, I've seen companies start shortening links with the tracking info inside it. Amazon and Spotify are ones I see frequently
I'm aware that with most privacy issues, a lot of people have limited understanding about it. Hell, I'm probably ignorant on many other privacy issues outside of this topic.
Phones and chrome are designed to prevent people from noticing that they're being tracked and helping big tech track others
Agreed. Recently youtube started adding tracking parameters (?si=) to their share links. I always clean them up.
This would be a good feature add to Lemmy. Clean pre-post.
People barely know what a browser is, you cant expect them to know what an url is, let alone what clearing it is
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.
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.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/master/LegitimateURLShortener.txt
Add that to people you know Ublock lists
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
Some apps are hiding it behind shortened URLs. So it looks clean, but if you expand it, then oh boy.
Yeah I hate that I never trusted shortened urls
I wish websites would clean their URLs
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
Interesting, I never really thought about this before. I wonder if there’s a clipboard manager that does this automatically?
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.
For android, I use this: https://github.com/TrianguloY/UrlChecker
For firefox, I use ublock origin and add then anti url tracking list. Adguard maintains such a list. I forgot the exact name though.
Edit: it's this one https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AdguardTeam/FiltersRegistry/master/filters/filter_17_TrackParam/filter.txt
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).
Nope. It's a nightmare. The ad company now knows that you are friends or family
But what If you send it via social media like Lemmy or Reddit?
Then they know who's the poster (you), they can know your username if they want to. A lot of people use the same username in many places, so unless you use different usernames in different social media, it's still valuable data.
If not that, seeing how the content spreads through social media and analyzing the reach is interesting data by itself.
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.
On Android, LinkSheet supports cleaning URLs. It's an awesome tool in general.
Urlcheck foss app also do very good work
I try to do it. Mainly i see a lot of ?utm_source shit and kill it.
iOS 17 is supposed to do this automatically now.
https://9to5mac.com/2023/06/08/ios-17-link-tracking-protection/
Kind of annoying they only do it in Safari in private mode, and not as a default.
A personal gripe of mine. I can't get any of my friends/family to care...
I have no idea how to clean a URL and honestly I'm not interested in cleaning every URL I send.
Quick rule: Just remove all of the garbage after a "?" except what is directly following a "search=" or "query=" parameter.
Oh yeah I do that by default, if the URL is too long with random stuff at the end I remove what I can without breaking the link
I care about this also. I used to clean them up, but what I've started doing is adding and replacing parts of the share id. And I'll usually put something stupid in there like "booger", just to screw up their tracking data.
I sometimes leave some IDs in that don't change and seem to track me as a person so the tracking mixes them up with me if the trackers don't discard it on client change.
If anything that just makes it easier to map your social circle. Probably even intentional to see who you share links with.
Brave includes “copy clean link” in the context menu in the desktop version.
Amen.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
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