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

  • paris@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    2·
    1 year ago

    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 &