and/or use the Clear URLs extension.
The
?part (parameters) sometimes do play a role. But by removing parts like?maxheight=300, you can sometimes get higher quality images.Then there’s the
#part (section). If you’re referencing a section in a long document, check if there’s a ToC linking to headings, or a#link next to them. For PDFs,#page=Xusually works. BTW it is mostly harmless: just identify the HTML element ID to scroll into view and most browsers don’t send it to the server (but JavaScript can access it).Save this in your bookmarks:
I used to do this when I used Instagram and YouTube. I don’t bother sending urls to those sites to anyone nowadays, but if I did, I wish there was a hack to remove that shit automatically.
If you use an ad free front-end like Tubular for YouTube, it sanitises the URL before copying to clipboard.
I assume the same is true for Revanced et al. But I haven’t confirmed personally.
Thanks!
uBlock has an option to remove these…
Here it is on mobile.
this has not many users so pretty trackable, so more of us should use it to make it work better
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/refer-deez-nuts/
its like clear urls but sets the string to deez_nuts
I leave it depending on whats contained. Like if it’s clear that it communicates the link came from the Fediverse or an RSS feed I want them to know to keep using those things. Other wise I take em out
Some websites do have required information after the
?which is needed for linking to the correct page/section.If you’re not sure, try deleting it and pasting the modified link in a new tab. If it doesn’t work, try again with one additional argument (the text separated by
?or&) at a time until the link works.also, like, look at what the text is. If it says
?tracking=8kk90902qthen it’s probably a tracking string, if it says?video=k8a9rit’s probably important to get the actual content you’re linking to.
Does Peertube also try to spy on me, or do I only have to do this for google?
So you’ll see these refers in lots of sites, and it’s likely just statistics collection. If the referring text is always the same, it’s that the site legitimately just wants to know hwo many people are clicking a particular link.
You’ll see it really often in email newsletters that they will end in ref=fromemail or ref=fronsocial when posted to social media. On the database side, all the tracking information would be aggregated under the same one.
As with everything, this can be used in a harmless way or more maliciously, but at end of the day, all it helps is identify where particular traffic is coming from. For YouTube, the ID is connected to who shared the link, when it was shared, etc. It attempts to use that information against the person who clicked the link to try and work out better ads and YouTube recommendations for both of them, so you’ll stay in YouTube longer and see more ads.
Thanks for the tip, I’ll do that from now on
I use urlchecker from triangulous for this
I’ve been seeing youtube links with an
&is=, is that the same thing or something else?The only important ones to keep for youtube are
v=<whatever>, since that’s the video ID, andt=<whatever>, the timestamp.yep. different websites have different identifiers but are functionally the same
Instead of using a whole new extension (which increase your attack surface), just
- Add this filterlist to uBlock Origin: https://gitlab.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/-/raw/master/LegitimateURLShortener.txt
- Enable “AdGuard/uBO - URL Tracking Protection” filterlist
ClearURLs extensiom needs the ability to read and modify every link you visit, which is very dangerous. Highly recommend just using uBlock Origin because it can do the same thing.
From a layman, thank you
Another useful rule:
If you are on a gargantuan site with millions of unique content items, and the link is unreasonably short, it is likely a personalized link tied to your account.
Facebook does this, I think TikTok too, which might even show the viewer which account generated the link, hence doxing your real identity.Always try to get the content link from the web url through a private browser window, instead of clicking dedicated “Share” buttons on pages.
Examples (from memory, so inaccurate) :
facebook.com/share/GPQR221
instead of
facebook.com/video/10000021928282/…YouTube is an exception to this rule.
Amazon does this too.
Sharing a tracked link is a netizens equivalent of sneezing without covering your face. Unhygienic
On this regard, Reddit also no longer lets you sort by top/all without getting TONS of trackers.
assholes. good thing i left for lemmy
Yay, me too! 🥳
