I use an app called “Leon URL Cleaner” from F-Droid. Does a really good job removing tracking params, and only adds one extra step to sharing a URL.
There’s also URLCheck:
There are URL shortener Apps on F-Droid. Simple share the link to this app and get a short link without this privacy mess.
Make sure you choose a proper open source one, else the app might collect data as well…
I did not know what those were for before seeing this but I remeber seeing “source=chat_gpt” next to a link to a source in a news article and thought that it was odd.
That just means that the idiot writing the article got the link provided to them by chatgpt during their research. All it does is tell the website that you visited that you followed a link from the given source. They can aggregate the data from all visitors for metrics, to see where they lag behind in exposure. But they can’t associate users to each other with this method.
Unlike the “igsh” tag in instagram post/reel urls, which when opened, will immediately create a popup stating “join <user that shared the URL with you> on Instagram today!”
Check out this cool video
ClearURLs was my go to on Firefox, I think it’s still great but it gave me trouble on a couple of sites because it modified the url in the address bar (it was like AliExpress and shopee, Chinese e-commerce sites that look like a web dev vomited, so I hardly blame ClearURLs)
Firefox also now has “copy clean link” when you right click the url bar which also works great.
I also use URLCheck on my phone. Made it the default browser and it pops up with options to clean the link and choose which browser to open it with
Firefox also now has “copy clean link” when you right click the url bar which also works great.
I am an avid and exclusive user of Firefox and I never discovered this because it never would have occurred to me in a million years to right click the URL bar for any reason. So I’ll be damned; there it is. (I always just lasso the relevant part myself and hit ctrl + c.)
Thanks. I didn’t know about that. Although I tried doing it and the option was grayed out. Any idea what might be wrong? Do I need to change a setting or something? This was on youtube.
I don’t think YouTube actually has tracking parameters in the url normally, but if you use the share button then the youtu.be link will include the video ID as well tracking. But it looks like you can kinda use it there too if you select the link with tracking, it seems to detect that it’s a link and offers the clean link option when you right click it.
If you go to an Amazon item page then you should see it available when right clicking the address bar.
This belongs more on Technology and Privacy communities.
For Android users at least, I recommend the Léon URL Cleaner app, when you share a link from many common sources to the URL Cleaner, it removes all that tracking shit for you, and copies the cleaned link to the clipboard.
This belongs more on Technology and Privacy communities.
I guess it was posted here to reach a broader audience.
I’m upset, the tech and privacy communities need to step it up cause I’ve never seen this fact. I kinda knew URLs had a lot of junk, but I never knew what could be removed.
The way I’ve always figured it out is by deleting some, then loading the page in a different browser or an incognito window, and repeat until the URL is as minimal as possible, while still loading correctly. For websites you use regularly, you’ll figure it out pretty quickly.
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
Just a reminded, if you have the Clipboard Manager called Ditto
You can strip those right out of your pasted URLs, even many at once !
(for windows users, for linux there is https://github.com/farzher/clipman but it lacks that particular feature at this time )
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.
does anyone know what ?feature=shared does in youtube links and whether it’s worth removing it?
You can remove it, it tells YouTube how you got to that video. In this case someone shared it.
Not very high priority to remove though. Nothing identfiable in the gran scheme I guess.
Generally, if it’s just a plain word or something you can read easily, then it’s safe to keep it. If it’s a jumble of seemingly random letters, it’s probably a tracking code of some sort.
Yeah, wikipedia does something similar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse?wprov=sfla1
The stuff after
?indicates that the article was shared. I usually don’t remove it to let wikipedia have some user stats.
If you are using iOS, you can create a shortcut or download one of the premade shortcuts without any 3rd party apps :3
Do you have a link to any of these :)
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.
I like this to trim/handle redirects https://f-droid.org/packages/com.trianguloy.urlchecker/
I always do this when I post YouTube links. Be damned if I want to be associated with you lot! (Seriously though, it’s a good idea to do)
Don’t some browsers do this automatically?
I would assume there’s an extendion/add-on for than already
Yes, at least for Firefox:
