1 yr. ago • 97%

I wish more people clean URLs before sharing it to others.

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

166

166 comments

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

279
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 :)

101
To be honest 99% of people, certainly including me, probably don't recognize tracking elements in a URL unless they're like affiliate links.

49
Phones and chrome are designed to prevent people from noticing that they're being tracked and helping big tech track others

40
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.

36
Agreed. Recently youtube started adding tracking parameters (?si=) to their share links. I always clean them up.

29
Indeed. I use Léon on Android, very straightforward, open source, and easy to install and configure...

https://github.com/svenjacobs/leon

29
This would be a good feature add to Lemmy. Clean pre-post.

27
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

24
People barely know what a browser is, you cant expect them to know what an url is, let alone what clearing it is

23
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

22
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/master/LegitimateURLShortener.txt

Add that to people you know Ublock lists

18
I wish websites would clean their URLs

15
Interesting, I never really thought about this before. I wonder if there’s a clipboard manager that does this automatically?

15
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

14
On Android, LinkSheet supports cleaning URLs. It's an awesome tool in general.

12
I try to do it. Mainly i see a lot of ?utm_source shit and kill it.

12
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.

12
I use URLCheck on Android, and recommend it. I hate the nasty vomit URLs that people share, and I always click a URL and open with URLCheck (no defaults set for anything on phone) before opening it with my browser, NewPipe or whatever else.

11
Filter cleaner should be built into the browser.

11
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).

11
unfortunately most people don't know what a url is.

gui was a mistake, or something.

8
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).

8
iOS 17 is supposed to do this automatically now.

https://9to5mac.com/2023/06/08/ios-17-link-tracking-protection/

6
Every website these days will just hijack any link posted on their service and there's not a whole lot you can do other than just physically typing in the intended address character by character. No one wants to do that. No one cares. And these platforms know that. That's why they do it 🖕

6
https://github.com/TrianguloY/UrlChecker

5
Permanently Deleted

4
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.

4
Anything after the question mark in a URL gets deleted before I share it. Screw trackers

4
A personal gripe of mine. I can't get any of my friends/family to care...

4
I feel the same, I actually feel weird when someone shares with me a url with tracking or source tags, like bro you’re telling on yourself… do you not care?!

3
I'm with you!!

3
Amen.

3
I always just reply with the real URL.

2
I shall do it, because i hate this URL ads, even more the fucking link shortener, because they disguised it and avoid to see the destination. Because of this i use 2 extension, a Link unshortener, which reveal the real URL, when i click on a shorten link also the Adguardfilter in the Vivaldi's own trackerblocker, You can find more filters here:

https://filterlists.com

2
does lemmy automatically clean urls?

2
Good reminder, I'd never considered that 😅 So why did lots of reddit subs discourage the use of URL shorteners? Was this just standard Reddit badness?

2
I have no idea how to clean a URL and honestly I'm not interested in cleaning every URL I send.

1
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.

0
Brave includes “copy clean link” in the context menu in the desktop version.

-1

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