2y ago

I wish more people clean URLs before sharing it to others.

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

164 comments

Friends and family don't know what cleaning a URL means. Nobody does.
- And ironic that OP doesn't share how to clean them.
  
  Because it's different for every website.
  
  On YouTube links, delete anything after the ?
  Someone post the next website
  
  www.urlex.org
  
  Remove everything after the question mark.
  
  also kinda common sense if you know anything about urls
  
  Because I don't expect the target audience to be here in /c/privacy
- 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.
- They don't necessarily need to; hopefully we can help people install uBlock Origin which removes tracking query parameters from URLs. See privacy.txt
- That's why I always install ClearURLs on my family members computers
  
  Great extension and good recommend
  
  Thank you for the suggestion. Downloaded
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 :)
- As long as they don't link them to those links, thereby confusing them to the point of being completely turned off to the idea
To be honest 99% of people, certainly including me, probably don't recognize tracking elements in a URL unless they're like affiliate links.
- Pretty much all junk which isn't human readable is tracking info
  
  Hard to follow that as a rule. Consider any YouTube video, the video id isn't exactly human readable.
- 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.
  
  I mean, I've seen companies start shortening links with the tracking info inside it. Amazon and Spotify are ones I see frequently
- I'm aware that with most privacy issues, a lot of people have limited understanding about it. Hell, I'm probably ignorant on many other privacy issues outside of this topic.
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.
Agreed. Recently youtube started adding tracking parameters (?si=) to their share links. I always clean them up.
Indeed. I use Léon on Android, very straightforward, open source, and easy to install and configure...
https://github.com/svenjacobs/leon
- 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
  
  It looks like Lèon is for sharing (outbound) links to others whereas UrlChecker handles shared (inbound) links. Is that right? Or can UrlChecker also scrub a link before I send it?
- You can also use LinkSheet.
This would be a good feature add to Lemmy. Clean pre-post.
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.
  
  Yeah I hate that I never trusted shortened urls
- Occasionally there will be an id or something in the parameters that breaks the link if it's absent. I dislike those URLs.
People barely know what a browser is, you cant expect them to know what an url is, let alone what clearing it is
- People generally don't care (I myself am not at the level of this community). It also involves enough technical know-how that most people won't care. It's like asking people to use a CLI, not going to happen. I'm pretty sure I'm one of the few people who still C&P URLs to share, most people hit a "Share" button.
  
  You're both right: most people don't know what any of this means, but also people who know often don't care. In my group of friends there are 2 programmers, they perfectly understand this yet they still share links full of trackers in the group chat.
  My strategy is to friendly scold them (a programmer should know better) and in the same message share the same link without tracking rubbish. This way my non-technical friends can also see how short the same link can become.
- It's not just browser though, sharing links from apps also generate these URLs. A lot of people then share these links through chat apps.
  I do realize that most people are not aware of it, that's why I said this is more of a rant. Just want to vent to fellow privacy minded people.
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
- If you use ublock origin, I find add-ons such as ClearURLs to be no longer necessary.
  You can just add url tracking filter like this one maintained by adguard to ublock origin: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AdguardTeam/FiltersRegistry/master/filters/filter_17_TrackParam/filter.txt
  
  For more tech-savvy users, sure. But I thought you were looking for a way for less technical users to share scrubbed URLs. You're not going to get the less technical users out there who share URLs to add a URL tracking filter list to uBlock Origin, but getting them to install ClearURLs is within the realm of possibility.
  
  How do I use this filter?
- Yeah, some high-tracking sites do break, and I'll need to turn it off temporarily. If ClearUrls breaks a site, it means that the site baked tracking into the functional features of the site itself (which, besides being terrifying, violates GDPR).
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/master/LegitimateURLShortener.txt
Add that to people you know Ublock lists
- You know it's legit because it's in the name!
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.
- 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
I wish websites would clean their URLs
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
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.
- Someone just told me about this app an few days ago and I'm loving it!
I do this because I hate super long URL's, but is this actually a problem for privacy? Does it not actually fuck with the tracking because now two separate people have got the same tracking Params? (Genuine question).
- Nope. It's a nightmare. The ad company now knows that you are friends or family
  
  But what If you send it via social media like Lemmy or Reddit?
I try to do it. Mainly i see a lot of ?utm_source shit and kill it.
On Android, LinkSheet supports cleaning URLs. It's an awesome tool in general.
- Urlcheck foss app also do very good work
- Is it me or that feature make the the startup time unbearably slow? After I got tired of waiting seconds the app to show me the link opening options I just disabled that ajd keep URL check on the side for when I see the link is riddled with useless parameters (or even worse URLs inside URLs)
Filter cleaner should be built into the browser.
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/
- Kind of annoying they only do it in Safari in private mode, and not as a default.
  
  Is it? Found this setting: https://forums.macrumors.com/attachments/img_1639-png.2219522/
  Not sure what the default is and I don't have iOS 17 yet.
  
  Most things iOS does when it comes to Safari is annoying.
Every website these days will just hijack any link posted on their service and there's not a whole lot you can do other than just physically typing in the intended address character by character. No one wants to do that. No one cares. And these platforms know that. That's why they do it 🖕
- I mean it takes 10 secs to hold the back key though and get rid of it
https://github.com/TrianguloY/UrlChecker
- Could something like this be built into the lemmy frontend?
  
  I can see a bot doing it, behaving like the Piped-Bot with an explanation why it's important to remove the tracking.
  
  That's an interesting idea. Although some websites/apps will have some quirks that might break the general rules.
A personal gripe of mine. I can't get any of my friends/family to care...
- It needs to be and should be automatic. But it's not in the interests of media platforms to add such functionality
I care about this also. I used to clean them up, but what I've started doing is adding and replacing parts of the share id. And I'll usually put something stupid in there like "booger", just to screw up their tracking data.
Anything after the question mark in a URL gets deleted before I share it. Screw trackers
- Does that do the trick?
  
  theoretically it should, everything after the ? is literally just tracking shit and parameters, everything before is purely navigation stuff
I'm with you!!
Amen.
I shall do it, because i hate this URL ads, even more the fucking link shortener, because they disguised it and avoid to see the destination. Because of this i use 2 extension, a Link unshortener, which reveal the real URL, when i click on a shorten link also the Adguardfilter in the Vivaldi's own trackerblocker, You can find more filters here:
https://filterlists.com
I feel the same, I actually feel weird when someone shares with me a url with tracking or source tags, like bro you’re telling on yourself… do you not care?!
does lemmy automatically clean urls?
Good reminder, I'd never considered that 😅 So why did lots of reddit subs discourage the use of URL shorteners? Was this just standard Reddit badness?
- Because url shorteners can be used to hide affiliate links or even malicious URLs.
I always just reply with the real URL.
I have no idea how to clean a URL and honestly I'm not interested in cleaning every URL I send.
- At least you're honest about your ignorance
  
  Yup this is true
- Quick rule: Just remove all of the garbage after a "?" except what is directly following a "search=" or "query=" parameter.
  
  Oh yeah I do that by default, if the URL is too long with random stuff at the end I remove what I can without breaking the link
  
  As if "search" and "query" are the only two legit get parameters lol...
I agree completely but most good browsers will automatically filter that stuff out. (Extensions like ClearURL are completely obsolete)
I sometimes leave some IDs in that don't change and seem to track me as a person so the tracking mixes them up with me if the trackers don't discard it on client change.
- If anything that just makes it easier to map your social circle. Probably even intentional to see who you share links with.
  
  Nah, that's when you leave the share tracking ID in. Keep up
- idk, this seems like a 99 IQ strat
Brave includes “copy clean link” in the context menu in the desktop version.

164 comments