Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

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Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
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I wish more people clean URLs before sharing it to others. (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by narwhal@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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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

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[–] Saff@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] Synnr@sopuli.xyz 6 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] narwhal@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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