cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/31187638
Earlier today I came across a Reddit comment with a link to an Instagram post. The link had
?igsh=at the end.When I clicked on the link, I got this popup. It had a name and profile photo that was different from that of the post being shared.
Join Firstname Lastname on Instagram
See photos, videos, and more from Firstname Lastname.
[ Open Instagram ]
not now
I avoid link trackers. However, I did not realize it was this bad.
To my knowledge, TikTok does the same thing and lists the name of the person that shared the link. Assuming this increases engagement, any website could enable such a feature, even on old links that you shared in the past.
You should manually remove any trackers before sharing, or use an app for it.
I tend to manually strip out anything random hash-looking from URLs. Not so much because I’m worried about identity being exposed, but because it just encourages data-mining and figuring out what causes people to post links places.
There’s some open-source app I recall on Android in F-Droid that will do this for a set of known sites, “Link Cleaner” or something.
kagis
“Leon – URL Cleaner”. I assume that this is an allusion to the movie.
https://github.com/svenjacobs/leon
I also strip off the extension that the Wikipedia app adds to indicate that Wikipedia links are from the app.
I also strip off “m.” leading URLs, like “m.wikipedia.org”, since that, by convention, forces desktop users to see a mobile version of a site, which is not normally what they want, whereas a non-.m link will still show the mobile site to mobile users.
Latest versions of Firefox offer to copy and paste URL without trackers. I am not sure how it compares to specialized tools.
How do I use this feature? I’m a Firefox user since quantum and had no idea this was a thing.
Just right click a link, it’s the option directly under copy link.
Never knew it, very neat!
Apparently it doesn’t work with YouTube. That’s an elephant sized hole.
Google pays them a lot of money. Are you surprised?
SHOCKED! /s
I’d rather not attribute to malice what is more easily explained by incompetence.
There is a Firefox addon called ClearURLs that automatically removes all of the tracking crap. It works on PC and Android.
uBlock Origin also has a filter built-in, though you have to enable it. It’s under Filter Lists > Privacy > AdGuard URL Tracking Protection
Thank you, I had no idea. Already had uBlock Origin on my phone (FF), so that’s one less extension needed. Works perfectly!
How does it work?
I assume it blocks something from loading, but I wouldn’t exactly know. I haven’t looked into it.
Generally anything that comes after a questionmark in a URL can be safely stripped out, though not always. The random string of characters you get after a youtu.be link is tracking, the ?t=123 is a timestamp.
YouTube has an even better example of it being problematic to strip the parameters. The original video links look like this:
The thing is, the stuff after the question mark isn’t inherently bad, we just have the convention that the path (
/watch) should identify a static resource on the server, whereas the stuff after the question mark is more variable or user-specific.But YouTube is older than that convention. If YouTube got built today, that URL would look more like this:
On the other hand, the URL of a specific search result page would still look the same, even with today’s conventions, because it doesn’t identify a static resource:
Nice example link you used there
Thanks, although I don’t believe there’s any other link I could’ve used. 🙃
Bless you kind netizen
URLCheck may be the app you’re thinking of.
Edit: the way it works, is that you set it up as your default browser. Then, whenever you hit a link, it will open up URLCheck first, and you’ll get to decide what to do with the link, strip away query parameters, and which app to open the link with.
You don’t have to. You can just copy any URL and share it to the app. Then copy it from the app.
Omg I’ve wanted something like this for a long time. Thanks!
Setting anything as your default “browser” when it’s not a browser is only a little sus — “open” source, or no.
Don’t share a link if you can’t find its complete “verbose” version.
…
🤷🏽♂️🤞🏽
The reasoning is super transparent. It’s the only way it could do what it’s doing. 🤷🏼♀️
How is it more “sus” than setting any other application as default browser? It needs to be default because that’s how Android works.
You can also set default browser to ‘none’ then anytime you tap a link a list of browsers and things like Leon, URL check etc. will pop up. In any case they don’t require internet access to work.
Yeah I have a habit of doing this and then testing the link to find the smallest possible version. Mostly because I find it annoying when I want to text a link to someone and it takes up an entire page of the chat.
Leon is great. I try to remember to use it anytime I share a link. As a result, I have found that that some links are just the base url plus a UUID (e.g.
mycoolshoppingsite.com/GAJEBKT), so you can’t strip out the tracking without breaking the link entirely.