Friends and family don't know what cleaning a URL means. Nobody does.
this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2023
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Privacy
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And ironic that OP doesn't share how to clean them.
On YouTube links, delete anything after the ?
Someone post the next website
That's terrible advice, you'd just be left with
You need the "?v=" and the jumble of letters immediately after.
For example: https://youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
XcQ, link stays blue
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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They're talking about the query param that gets added when using the Share button: https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ?si=dwX01vG-EivlOoYe - the ?si=... should be removed.
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I had someone watch me edit a URL in the address bar and she clearly thought I was just fucking around, because there was no possible way that any human could edit the Matrix language up there and accomplish anything productive.
That's part of my point. Most people just don't know.
That's like telling someone to just tune their carburator.
inb4 you get an indignant reply suggesting that carburetor tuning is a must-have skill for absolutely anyone who owns anything that has one
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I mean carburetor tuning is a must-have skill for absolutely anyone who has one. Otherwise you can never be sure that you are getting an ideal fuel-air mixture, and the ratio changes over time with the temperature, humidity, seasons, etc. Really, it's irresponsible to not know how to do this if you have a car with a carburetor.
Brake line bleeding is a must-have skill for anyone with brakes. Otherwise you can never be sure not to have air in the brake lines. Really it's irresponsible not to know how to do this if you have a vehicle with idraulic brakes.
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They don't necessarily need to; hopefully we can help people install uBlock Origin which removes tracking query parameters from URLs. See privacy.txt
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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 :)
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To be honest 99% of people, certainly including me, probably don't recognize tracking elements in a URL unless they're like affiliate links.
If people were really good at removing that info, they'd probably create a unique hash including all that data that we wouldn't be able to edit.
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Phones and chrome are designed to prevent people from noticing that they're being tracked and helping big tech track others
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.
Indeed. I use Léon on Android, very straightforward, open source, and easy to install and configure...
Nice. I personally prefer using this one: https://github.com/TrianguloY/UrlChecker
This app is awesome, using it and really enjoying it
I would say this is my app do the year
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This would be a good feature add to Lemmy. Clean pre-post.
Agreed. Recently youtube started adding tracking parameters (?si=) to their share links. I always clean them up.
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
Some apps are hiding it behind shortened URLs. So it looks clean, but if you expand it, then oh boy.
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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
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People barely know what a browser is, you cant expect them to know what an url is, let alone what clearing it is
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https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/master/LegitimateURLShortener.txt
Add that to people you know Ublock lists
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I wish websites would clean their URLs
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.
Interesting, I never really thought about this before. I wonder if there’s a clipboard manager that does this automatically?
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.
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On Android, LinkSheet supports cleaning URLs. It's an awesome tool in general.
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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
Filter cleaner should be built into the browser.
I try to do it. Mainly i see a lot of ?utm_source shit and kill it.
unfortunately most people don't know what a url is.
gui was a mistake, or something.
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).
iOS 17 is supposed to do this automatically now.
https://9to5mac.com/2023/06/08/ios-17-link-tracking-protection/
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