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.
Because it's different for every website.
There's a lot of common patterns, but you have to understand how URLs work. You have to recognize which URL parameters are tracking ones or even just might be tracking. And that means you have to know how they work and that takes a moment.
In brief, URL parameters start after a ? in the URL and are formatted like key1=values&key2=value2. You can't usually remove all parameters because not all are tracking. To further complicate things, URLs can also have an anchor starting with a # character which will be after the URL parameters. You often don't want to remove that (though theoretically the anchor could in fact contain tracking details).
It's often trial and error to see which parameters you can remove. I do this a lot since I write a lot of technical documentation. Clean URLs make the documentation more compact and less likely to break. It's not just tracking stuff, but sometimes you need to remove temporal data that makes a page display data from a specific time when you want it to just default to the current time (etc).
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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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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.
I mean, I've seen companies start shortening links with the tracking info inside it. Amazon and Spotify are ones I see frequently
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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
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...
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.
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.
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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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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
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.
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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I try to do it. Mainly i see a lot of ?utm_source shit and kill 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
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On Android, LinkSheet supports cleaning URLs. It's an awesome tool in general.
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I use URLCheck on Android, and recommend it. I hate the nasty vomit URLs that people share, and I always click a URL and open with URLCheck (no defaults set for anything on phone) before opening it with my browser, NewPipe or whatever else.
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Filter cleaner should be built into the browser.
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).
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 🖕
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