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
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.
Most tracking parameters actually just specify the source the link came from. Like Twitter or an email. I don’t see a lot of tracking parameters that literally are tried to an individual account. But here you seem to be saying that’s the most common type of tracking param
Try sharing Instagram post or YouTube video from the apps.
Instagram adds ‘igshid=’ . YouTube adds ‘si=’.
Try sharing the same IG or YouTube content from different accounts. The ‘igshid’, ‘si’ param value will be different
It can be used to tag who shares it, and who clicks on that specific url param.
TikTok hides a ton of such params behind shortened url. Try expanding tiktok shared urls.