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
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?
It fortunately does both. You “share” a gross link to URLCheck, clean it up within the app, then can share the clean URL to whatever app.
Thanks. I tried it briefly along with Leon and LinkSheet (also mentioned in the comments). URLCheck is hands down the best of the bunch, but its UI is so terrible and obtuse that I can’t bring myself to have to interact with it regularly. Will keep an eye on it though!