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
Remove everything after the question mark.
This may work for sharing links to static content, but it is terrible advice for anything interactive. That removes all URL params and will break lots of interactive sites.
What would be considered interactive vs static? How would I explain that to someone, for example?
Most things you share will be static. These are things like news articles and webcomics where the output of the page is always the same no matter what you do. Things like google searches or YouTube links that are different depending on some way you interact with the site are dynamic. If you search for “apples” in google you’ll get different results than if you search for “oranges.” If you share the apple search with someone, your apple text will be coded as a parameter after the ?. If you strip that off they’d go to google.com and not see any apples. Trackers and other surveillance tools are also captured in the query params so for dynamic content it can be tricky to know which params to remove and which to keep. For static content you can just remove them all because the content doesn’t change based on the params you pass it
Very helpful, thank you
Like a YouTube link with a timecode, for example
Try it on a Google search results page
I’m not responsible for their shite code
deleted by creator
That’s just how http requests work though. It’s not their code it’s…the internet
If your url for a single item is a paragraph long - often repeating itself - and including shit that can be handled by css that is absolutely shit code. Temu is a particularly batshit example of this.
Ok but that isn’t the most common reason for url params
Ok but why are we pretending that’s what people are sharing? We’re talking about stripping garbage out of URLS when c&p. People are sharing static links - purchasable items, a funny video or a meme - if these links break when you remove additional constructs, then what the hell are you doing?
No, absolutely everything has to be a separate URL!
/s
Oh god could you imagine? Combinatorial explosion