PSA on privuhcy

Telling people to remove them isn’t very practical. Educating people is step 1, but step 2 is finding a browser extension or browser that scrubs the identifiers from URLs. You will inevitably forget to remove the tracker from the url if you do it manually.

Not everything after the ? can be removed. Obvious and well known example, YouTube videos use the video as part of the query parameters (on non shortened URLs). https://youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

One small error on an otherwise very useful post! 💜

Fun fact, YouTube has backwards comparability for its video links, so https://youtube.com/w/dQw4w9WgXcQ will go to the same video (granted, it will change format to the up to date one, but it is one way to go to a yt video without URL arguments)
- Even better: https://youtu.be/PtSGclOlVmg
I judge people based on whether they can understand youtube (which you should be changing to invidious or something else anyway) urls. It's a useful and very short way to see if people have ever paid attention to repeated patterns. The moment I saw the t=XYs, I was amazed.

"everything after the ? Symbol can be removed without issue" is a bold statement to make. Reminds me when the TV news had a specialist telling people to look at urls before clicking and check if it ends with ".php" as that would mean it is a virus.

Difference being that the ? in URLs separates the resource from additional information
So unless some website decides to identify the resource in those query field (for example search results pages in a web search), you are generally safe
In any case, messaging apps will try to navigate to the site to create a caption for your message, and that can be a way to check if it works or not

Everything after the ? can be safely removed

This is usually true but but not always. There's often times when a URL query like that is used to choose the page to load. I believe wordpress does this

WordPress uses a taxonomic system you choose with a mix of the Settings page and how you organize your template hierarchy. To my knowledge there is no out of the box query url functionality in the core system.
- There is. ?s= for a search, and you can combine it with other parameters such as date or taxonomy terms.
Sometimes I'll post a picture straight from a duckduckgo search, and it doesn't work without the stuff after the ?
(I'm also not sure how long the url is valid for, so I try not to do this too often)

There is also copy clean link option in firefox and brave

If you're still using firefox, right click -> copy clean link. works most of the time.

edit: on desktop, idk if mobile supports it or not. Good suggestions below though for mobile.

URL Cleaner on f-droid.org is a great app too!
I just searched and found this one:
https://linkcleaner.app/
The code is open source, and it supports several ways to install it on your device (PWA, shortcut, bookmarklet, and more).

I usually change the parameters to things like utm_source=yourmom, just for kicks.

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 usually just do it because shorter links look better than 30 lines of crap

Right? The fact that this is an extra bit of tracking information I don't want makes this an easy sell for anyone looking for a reason to do this, but for me it's because it just makes links uglier.

Add this URL Shortener filterlist to uBlock Origin.
This removes the fast majority of these query parameters.

I honestly couldn't determine if it was a typo or not, but it's not "fast" but "vast majority."
- my brain autocorrected it to "vast," but I like "fast majority" as a phrase
Can I ask how do use this? Do I just copy/paste this into the "my filters" tab in uBlock? ;
- Go to the "Filter lists" tab in the dashboard. At the bottom of the list click "Import" and paste the URL ( https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/master/LegitimateURLShortener.txt ) in the box. Then click "Apply Changes" to save it.

Legitimate concern, called URL tracking. There's browser extensions for that.

this isn't a shitpost this community is being dragged through the mud by non-shitposts

Actually, it's a a bit of a shitpost. Anything after the '?' is an argument for the html request. Can and is used for tracking, but is also used for website functionality.
- IMO, any developer who uses URL parameters for required functionality is short sighted. They should use the path as required parameters.
It's shitty advice masquerading as something useful and/or insightful.

Yep!

Only thing I want to see after a ? in a youtube url is t=4m20s

personally i like v=aO82NftCga to be in there as well

No no no no, keep em up, I can hack them and decrypt and do nasty things with that silly part of ~~code~~ link, to learn so much about our lovely friendship. And I promise I would never use that to harm You, really! hahahahahahahahaa

Oh source from newsletters? emails? oh that means You actively are using email adres, do any big spam company want validated email adres they can spam on? yeah, sure, 0.30€ each! (afaik, black market value is 100-600€ per 1000 valid addresses, just searched)
Tbh, unsure if si=Aa1Uc_fRHXC0ay85 or similars can be decrypted, or are just individual, one time identificators, never tried, but bet some do know how to pull value out of them.

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.

Everything after the "?" symbol can be removed without issue

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XfELJU1mRMg >>> https://youtube.com/watch

I've been using URL Check on Android to clean links of crap like this.

There's also Léon the URL Cleaner.

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=newsletter is 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

This tip really doesn't let me down, turns around and desert me

Check out this cool video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?

ClearURLs was my go to on Firefox, I think it's still great but it gave me trouble on a couple of sites because it modified the url in the address bar (it was like AliExpress and shopee, Chinese e-commerce sites that look like a web dev vomited, so I hardly blame ClearURLs)

Firefox also now has "copy clean link" when you right click the url bar which also works great.

Thanks. I didn't know about that. Although I tried doing it and the option was grayed out. Any idea what might be wrong? Do I need to change a setting or something? This was on youtube.
- I don't think YouTube actually has tracking parameters in the url normally, but if you use the share button then the youtu.be link will include the video ID as well tracking. But it looks like you can kinda use it there too if you select the link with tracking, it seems to detect that it's a link and offers the clean link option when you right click it.
  If you go to an Amazon item page then you should see it available when right clicking the address bar.
I also use URLCheck on my phone. Made it the default browser and it pops up with options to clean the link and choose which browser to open it with
Firefox also now has “copy clean link” when you right click the url bar which also works great.
I am an avid and exclusive user of Firefox and I never discovered this because it never would have occurred to me in a million years to right click the URL bar for any reason. So I'll be damned; there it is. (I always just lasso the relevant part myself and hit ctrl + c.)

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...
Are you talking about this app?
- Yes

Also relevant:

LinkSheet

Also leon

This. The question marks and ampersand in youtube URLs are separators and can include your entire playlist, as well. If you just want to share the video, then everything from the first ampersand onwards can go.

Add made up data to those parameters. Like source=ericsschmidtspedoisland

You all got Rick-rolled btw

XcQ all the way!
- “XcQ, LINK STAYS BLUE!” 😁
Only if they typed it in, but I appreciated a recognizable link!
And you just lost the game

Don't some browsers do this automatically?

I would assume there's an extendion/add-on for than already
- Yes, at least for Firefox:
  https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/clearurls/

hey you, yeah you, you're finally awake

I always do this when I post YouTube links. Be damned if I want to be associated with you lot! (Seriously though, it’s a good idea to do)

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:
https://f-droid.org/packages/com.trianguloy.urlchecker

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!"

How about I just don't use you tube? I should be ok.

It's on a lot of links
- It is and it should stop. I'm honestly almost to the point of leaving so much interneting behind so I can regain my skills at old school communication and information gathering. It must be so hard to do that now. It used to be so normal.
  I already have bonked all traditional social media including for my small business for reasons like this. I went back to posters and flyers and only promoting online solely in spaces like the fed. It's been hard but worthwhile I feel and after only about a year I am again getting more traffic. It's just a small income source but it's been an interesting foray into change.

PSA if you are worried about link parameters giving away where you came from, you should really be worried about HTTP Referrer headers, which are of course turned on by default in most browsers. Be advised turning them off may break some (parts of) certain websites, but most still work fine in my experience.

In Firefox go to about:config page and set network.http.sendRefererHeader to 0.

Or change them to 127.0.0.1 and get rid of some web app firewalls and restrictions

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

Time to put new privacy laws in place or force politicans to do it

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.

This is so important, too many people don’t know about this.

But still this is not shitposting. God .world sucks. Ble

I like this to trim/handle redirects https://f-droid.org/packages/com.trianguloy.urlchecker/

Does anyone want to talk about the "share with Facebook" and other similar social media links that track you?

No?

Cool. Cool cool cool cool cool cool cool cool cool

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.
Firefox mobile has plenty of add-ons that will just remove it for you

On iOS / iPadOS , you can use a Siri Shortcut called Clean URLs.

Just share the URL with the shortcut, through the share sheet option, and your clean url is automatically copied into the clipboard.

I am pretty sure firefox let's you remove trackers from url.

yup, its a right click option

does anyone know what ?feature=shared does in youtube links and whether it's worth removing it?

You can remove it, it tells YouTube how you got to that video. In this case someone shared it.
- Not very high priority to remove though. Nothing identfiable in the gran scheme I guess.

Brave for iOS has the Copy Clean Link option. There’s GNAT Cleaner from the App Store but I’ve never used it.

I tried adding screenshots but I haven’t been able to upload photos in almost a week.

The only way to be safe and private online is to not be online.

If you are using iOS, you can create a shortcut or download one of the premade shortcuts without any 3rd party apps :3

Do you have a link to any of these :)

I'm on mobile so I will have to drop a link later (if ever)

but do a websearch for the utility link cleaner

It's awesome. Thank me later.

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)
- 🫡
  Thank you
- The most gigachad source there is

I just use Firefox focus

I made a Firefox plugin that does this for you on YouTube. It's called "YouTube Clean Share" if anyone is interested

firefox has a right click option to remove those

I generally do this with the exception of query terms that indicate I got the link from their RSS feed. Just want to make sure their statistics indicate that they should keep supporting it.

Could maybe have a bit of fun randomising those strings.