Thing I find funny is when the url seems to indicate you came from an email or something. Now if I share it, anyone who clicks will also count as coming from an email. Dumass ruining your own statistics
This belongs more on Technology and Privacy communities.
For Android users at least, I recommend the Léon URL Cleaner app, when you share a link from many common sources to the URL Cleaner, it removes all that tracking shit for you, and copies the cleaned link to the clipboard.
This belongs more on Technology and Privacy communities.
I guess it was posted here to reach a broader audience.
I’m upset, the tech and privacy communities need to step it up cause I’ve never seen this fact. I kinda knew URLs had a lot of junk, but I never knew what could be removed.
The way I’ve always figured it out is by deleting some, then loading the page in a different browser or an incognito window, and repeat until the URL is as minimal as possible, while still loading correctly. For websites you use regularly, you’ll figure it out pretty quickly.
So annoying to always have to find out how far you can trim a URL before it breaks.
Happy cake day
Typically anything after the “?”. That’s where the parameters live. There are always exceptions.
There are many URLs that require parameters to load a resource (and aren’t necessarily tracking anything). With YouTube’s non-shortened links (for example), the video ID is after the
?, but is usually (but not always) immediately after.This:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQCan be shortened to:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQBut no shorter.
(actually, you can remove the
www.but that’s not relevant for illustrating my point)LOL: thank you Voyager or Lemmy.world for stripping it even from my inline code.
Here’s what I was trying to post:
But no shorter
yes, YouTube has shorter URL schemes, but given the scheme I was showing, the part after the
?can’t be removedI know, I was joking
/c/whoosh
Mh5GJlFUCKgjo7ufdb2
Nice try.
I mean that’s part of the fun of surfing the web, you get to play a fun puzzle game of “How to Lobotomize a URL”
There should be an extension that does this
uBlock Origin with the appropriate filter list will do it for you, like this one: https://github.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/blob/master/LegitimateURLShortener.txt
If you run across a link with a regular “?utm_source=…” , that can not tell people anything about you. It simply tells the website “register one click onto this article coming from this specific newsletter we sent out”. It does not tie this information to you.
With other tracking things, what is described here is absolutely possible though.
It’s not always nefarious.
I work for a non-profit. Sometimes it’s helpful to understand the click rate on a mass message.
We don’t provide data to third parties and use a self-hosted oss analytics platform.
So I think folks should understand tracking and manage it but it’s not all bad. Just almost always bad. Really bad.
Worse: a lot of links can’t be fixed or modified since they use click-through services to obscure the destination.
I’m a web developer in a marketing department and agreed UTM tags aren’t really nefarious. We generally use them to track campaigns, and to see the effectiveness of our paid campaigns. (As in how much of a return on investment did we have, are people continuing to traverse the site after hitting the landing page, etc) That said those codes generally don’t give us any info about the user other than what parts of the site you are hitting, (which we can find out through other means anyway). There are tools out there which can give us a creepy amount of data about the users on the site, but UTMs aren’t it.
Removing them when sending out links is good practice as you probably only really need a fraction of the characters in order to get to the site, so your links are cleaner, you look like less of an idiot, and ironically marketers will end up having cleaner data (I doubt you care about this, but it’s true.)
That said, if you really want to prevent sites from getting your data when browsing turning off JavaScript in your browser would probably have the biggest impact.
I just use Firefox focus
I usually change the parameters to things like utm_source=yourmom, just for kicks.
Most of my internetin’ is done on mobile, because I’m very rarely at my desk, and when I am, I’m normally working on school. Are there any solutions to handling this easily on mobile without having to manually erase part of the pasted link when I go to send it to someone? A few people have mentioned that’s it’s not 100% guaranteed that the anything after ? Is worthless, so I don’t know how to ensure I’m not breaking a link
I posted a comment above, but if you’re android, check out leon. Super easy to use.
So how about when a link is shared on Lemmy or Reddit or FB? Do the latter strip out the identifiers, or does that one person’s reshared post associate them with the clicks of thousands of others?
For web links, they’d also be able to find the source from the referrer tags etc
Lemmy removes these (source: i wrote that code)
This is kinda true but also kinda fear mongering. UTM parameters are just to track where you clicked the link from. They’re usually not dynamic, and don’t contain anything about you personally. The example in the screenshot
utm_source=newsletteris probably added to all links in a company’s newsletter email, so they can tell that people get to the page via the newsletter.As someone who has link tracking in our business, yes, some of the stuff after the ? isn’t nefarious tracking, like the utm mentioned above.
All the “list-unsubscribe” options you may have noticed starting about a year ago, are actually required to be there for any company that sends out any kind of email newsletter over a certain threshold. (Lists around 5k or more)
If the unsubscribe links aren’t there, with the required url-encoded parameters (along with some other requirements with DNS) the email will not be delivered to any of the majors (google, yahoo/aol, hotmail, big ISPs) and we get blocked.
The unsubscribe parameters are being tracked, yes, but we have to have them so we can unsubscribe you “in one click” We are not allowed to require you to sign in to unsubscribe you. (Not that we ever did that, but now there must be a one-click option.)
(We used to just be two clicks to unsubscribe off an encoded link. Click -> this you? If yes, click -> you are now unsubscribed. Or sign-in and manage subscriptions without an encoded link.)
Again, the point is that not all url encoded tracking is nefarious. Some of it is now required to try and minimize spam and nefarious emails.
Source: https://craft.postmark-testing.com/blog/2024-gmail-yahoo-email-requirements
I use an app called “Leon URL Cleaner” from F-Droid. Does a really good job removing tracking params, and only adds one extra step to sharing a URL.
There’s also URLCheck:
They are called query parameters and they are used for other things as well. So you can remove the ones you see similar to these but sometimes there might be important stuff you need to get the page to load in those parameters.
After removing them (or even if there was nothing to remove) I test out links I’m sending in a private browser window to check that they would work for other people.
I did not know what those were for before seeing this but I remeber seeing “source=chat_gpt” next to a link to a source in a news article and thought that it was odd.
That just means that the idiot writing the article got the link provided to them by chatgpt during their research. All it does is tell the website that you visited that you followed a link from the given source. They can aggregate the data from all visitors for metrics, to see where they lag behind in exposure. But they can’t associate users to each other with this method.
Unlike the “igsh” tag in instagram post/reel urls, which when opened, will immediately create a popup stating “join <user that shared the URL with you> on Instagram today!”
Check out this cool video
There are URL shortener Apps on F-Droid. Simple share the link to this app and get a short link without this privacy mess.
Make sure you choose a proper open source one, else the app might collect data as well…
