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
Friends and family don’t know what cleaning a URL means. Nobody does.
And ironic that OP doesn’t share how to clean them.
Because it’s different for every website.
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).
I mean, you can just install ClearURLs on Firefox for both desktop and Android and it will cover 99% of cases completely automatically without any technical knowledge.
On YouTube links, delete anything after the ?
Someone post the next website
That’s terrible advice, you’d just be left with
You need the “?v=” and the jumble of letters immediately after.
For example: https://youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
XcQ, link stays blue
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Now that is even better! That is clean! :-D
They’re talking about the query param that gets added when using the Share button: https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ?si=dwX01vG-EivlOoYe - the ?si=… should be removed.
That shit is so annoying and they just started to add it.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/dQw4w9WgXcQ?si=dwX01vG-EivlOoYe
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I have memorized this link so I know what is rickroll without opening it.
That’s terrible advice, […]
Is it really? It reliably protects people from all the garbage content on youtube.
Wait shit you’re right. I’m too used to the mobile links that have the ID after the slash
already too much work for normies
Remove everything after the question mark.
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.
What would be considered interactive vs static? How would I explain that to someone, for example?
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
Very helpful, thank you
Like a YouTube link with a timecode, for example
Try it on a Google search results page
I’m not responsible for their shite code
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That’s just how http requests work though. It’s not their code it’s…the internet
No, absolutely everything has to be a separate URL!
/s
Oh god could you imagine? Combinatorial explosion
If your url for a single item is a paragraph long - often repeating itself - and including shit that can be handled by css that is absolutely shit code. Temu is a particularly batshit example of this.
Ok but that isn’t the most common reason for url params
also kinda common sense if you know anything about urls
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Because I don’t expect the target audience to be here in /c/privacy
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
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.
Well, that’s plain ignorant. But you do you.
Rants are rants, that’s fine imo
How so? This is a rant post, I’m not trying to present it differently.
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You’re good, no worries. You created a lot of dialog, and most of it is helpful. I’m not complaining.
Thanks. Looking back, maybe I should’ve at least explained about it a little more. At the time I just wanted to blow off some steam.
I could have worded my response better myself.
I’m looking forward to your next rant, tbh
No but that’s what the comments are for. I share if the discussion is relevant.
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.
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.
That’s part of my point. Most people just don’t know.
That’s like telling someone to just tune their carburator.inb4 you get an indignant reply suggesting that carburetor tuning is a must-have skill for absolutely anyone who owns anything that has one
LOL, wait, is it copypasta or does that guy just post that a lot?
It is now.
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.
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.
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)
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.
I take it you missed my bracketed comment acknowledging it was probably sarcastic.
LMFAO, I’m actually dying over here. 😂
Have you met… Anyone?
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They don’t necessarily need to; hopefully we can help people install uBlock Origin which removes tracking query parameters from URLs. See privacy.txt
That’s why I always install ClearURLs on my family members computers
Great extension and good recommend
Thank you for the suggestion. Downloaded
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You’re right
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Thankfully uBlock Origin removes those parameters for us. The default filters include a whole bunch of
removeparamfilters; 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 :)
As long as they don’t link them to those links, thereby confusing them to the point of being completely turned off to the idea
To be honest 99% of people, certainly including me, probably don’t recognize tracking elements in a URL unless they’re like affiliate links.
Pretty much all junk which isn’t human readable is tracking info
Hard to follow that as a rule. Consider any YouTube video, the video id isn’t exactly human readable.
Actually it’s pretty easy. While not necessarily universally true, 98% of the time if there is a question mark everything after it is completely useless and can be removed.
for example of youtube, if you just use the share link from mobile you will get something like this
https://youtu.be/NMGQnFr0wMI?si=wcY56UThMAL6qkeg
However the only thing needed is
discord is similar, share a picture and you get shit like
but all that’s needed is
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/425755272191934466/1160245184110526586/1696478537347025.png
the ? is almost always used as an escape from the actual url. So if you see a question mark, Just remove everything after it and things will most likely still work.
This holds true for youtu.be links, but not youtube.com/watch?v=
Discord file url parameters are to prevent using discord as a free cdn. I believe discord plans on actually enforcing expiration later this year or early next year, at which point those extra url parameters will actually be necessary (and the links will no longer work indefinitely)
By the way for anyone who doesn’t know, the ? only appears once in the url. Successive question marks are instead denoted by &
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/NMGQnFr0wMI?si=wcY56UThMAL6qkeg
https://piped.video/NMGQnFr0wMI
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Yeah it doesn’t work for every website, but it’s an okay starting point
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
There it is :/
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
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:
product links are a major offender here.Agreed. Recently youtube started adding tracking parameters (
?si=) to their share links. I always clean them up.Indeed. I use Léon on Android, very straightforward, open source, and easy to install and configure…
Nice. I personally prefer using this one: https://github.com/TrianguloY/UrlChecker
This app is awesome, using it and really enjoying it
I would say this is my app do the year
It looks like Lèon is for sharing (outbound) links to others whereas UrlChecker handles shared (inbound) links. Is that right? Or can UrlChecker also scrub a link before I send it?
It fortunately does both. You “share” a gross link to URLCheck, clean it up within the app, then can share the clean URL to whatever app.
Thanks. I tried it briefly along with Leon and LinkSheet (also mentioned in the comments). URLCheck is hands down the best of the bunch, but its UI is so terrible and obtuse that I can’t bring myself to have to interact with it regularly. Will keep an eye on it though!
You can also use LinkSheet.
This would be a good feature add to Lemmy. Clean pre-post.
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
Occasionally there will be an id or something in the parameters that breaks the link if it’s absent. I dislike those URLs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you get them to install ClearUrls in their browser (Firefox, not Firefox), they can copy/paste URLs directly from their URL bar and the URL will be clean with no extra effort.
I keep it enabled in all my browser profiles pretty much always
If you use ublock origin, I find add-ons such as ClearURLs to be no longer necessary.
You can just add url tracking filter like this one maintained by adguard to ublock origin: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AdguardTeam/FiltersRegistry/master/filters/filter_17_TrackParam/filter.txt
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.
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.
How do I use this filter?
I just double checked, it should be included in the default filter list.
https://i.imgur.com/uKmWh0L.jpg
You just need to activate it.
For me this doesn’t seem to clean URLs though, it just blocks them and makes me type in the link manually.
Is there a way around this?
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.
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).
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.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/master/LegitimateURLShortener.txt
Add that to people you know Ublock lists
You know it’s legit because it’s in the name!
I wish websites would clean their URLs
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 thought I was alone in my windmill-tilting on this one! Nice to see there are others who clean URLs of unnecessary querystring parameters
