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.
No no no no, keep em up, I can hack them and decrypt and do nasty things with that silly part of
codelink, to learn so much about our lovely friendship. And I promise I would never use that to harm You, really! hahahahahahahahaaOh 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.
“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.
Youtube.com/watch?v=[Video ID]
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
This tip really doesn’t let me down, turns around and desert me
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
I’ve been using URL Check on Android to clean links of crap like this.
There’s also Léon the URL Cleaner.
There is also copy clean link option in firefox and brave
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=dQw4w9WgXcQOne 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
This is what I meant by the “non shortened” ones. If you’re using it through the app you can only press share to get the link and that’s how it comes when you press share. (Or if you press share on the website instead of copying the URL from the address bar.)
Even better: PeerTube or InternetArchive or (Web)Torrents but definitely not a Google website fueled by surveillance capitalism.
For a viewer: serious lack of content
For a creator: extremely unlikely to make a living
I want them to succeed but it’s an unfortunate position
Be the change you want to see. Here is my instance https://video.benetou.fr/ even if nobody cares, I tried.
Saying “be the change you want to see” doesn’t resolve any of the raised concerns.
You don’t think the link I give helps potential viewers by showing there is content out there?
Call me back when the experience as a content creator is not a nightmare, the experience as a user browsing for content is not a nightmare, when it can handle the load of an even moderately popular video.
The issue with streaming video online is not a technical one; making a “clone” of youtube, anyone can do so (and indeed, peertube exists). The issue with streaming video online is that if it gets traction, you need a lot of bandwidth and processing power to make it available when it needs to be available. One-two instances and “hopping P2P picks up” does not cut it.
And, as usual when anyone says anything bad about peertube: the idea is great, but almost by construction it lacks what’s needed to be a valid replacement for centralized, yet HUGE existing platforms: traction, and a truckload of CDN-like instances that can handle the load. If someone putting highly anticipated content online could just “put” their video somewhere and send a link so people can watch it, immediately, and without issue, some would likely do so. Unfortunately, we’re very far from that yet.
I did some live streams in the past. I share the link to my instance below. I can’t speak for large audiences.
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.
Don’t some browsers do this automatically?
I would assume there’s an extendion/add-on for than already
Yes, at least for Firefox:
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.
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.
Thank you kindly! 🏅
I usually change the parameters to things like utm_source=yourmom, just for kicks.
Legitimate concern, called URL tracking. There’s browser extensions for that.
So annoying to always have to find out how far you can trim a URL before it breaks.
Typically anything after the “?”. That’s where the parameters live. There are always exceptions.
There are many URLs that require parameters to load a resource (and aren’t necessarily tracking anything). With YouTube’s non-shortened links (for example), the video ID is after the
?, but is usually (but not always) immediately after.This:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQCan be shortened to:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQBut no shorter.
(actually, you can remove the
www.but that’s not relevant for illustrating my point)LOL: thank you Voyager or Lemmy.world for stripping it even from my inline code.
Here’s what I was trying to post:
Mh5GJlFUCKgjo7ufdb2
Nice try.
Happy cake day
Might be able to use a Redirect Checker, like:
or
Wonder if this helps with TikTok who has these custom URLs that don’t have parameters, just creepy personalized ones
I mean that’s part of the fun of surfing the web, you get to play a fun puzzle game of “How to Lobotomize a URL”
There should be an extension that does this
uBlock Origin with the appropriate filter list will do it for you, like this one: https://github.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/blob/master/LegitimateURLShortener.txt
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.
