PSA on privuhcy

So annoying to always have to find out how far you can trim a URL before it breaks.
- Typically anything after the "?". That's where the parameters live. There are always exceptions.
  
  There are many URLs that require parameters to load a resource (and aren’t necessarily tracking anything). With YouTube’s non-shortened links (for example), the video ID is after the ?, but is usually (but not always) immediately after.
  This:
  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
  Can be shortened to:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
  But no shorter.
  (actually, you can remove the www. but that’s not relevant for illustrating my point)
  LOL: thank you Voyager or Lemmy.world for stripping it even from my inline code.
  Here’s what I was trying to post:
- Happy cake day
- I mean that's part of the fun of surfing the web, you get to play a fun puzzle game of "How to Lobotomize a URL"
- There should be an extension that does this
  
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clearurls/

Everything after the ? can be safely removed
This is usually true but but not always. There's often times when a URL query like that is used to choose the page to load. I believe wordpress does this
- Only on "I have really bad SEO" kinds of blogs. Query strings have been considered a negative thing for many many years.
  
  whuh? querystrings are integral to things like pagination. they are by no means a negative thing.
  
  Not everybody cares for SEO BS
- WordPress uses a taxonomic system you choose with a mix of the Settings page and how you organize your template hierarchy. To my knowledge there is no out of the box query url functionality in the core system.
  
  There is. ?s= for a search, and you can combine it with other parameters such as date or taxonomy terms.
- Sometimes I'll post a picture straight from a duckduckgo search, and it doesn't work without the stuff after the ?
  (I'm also not sure how long the url is valid for, so I try not to do this too often)

This belongs more on Technology and Privacy communities.
For Android users at least, I recommend the Léon URL Cleaner app, when you share a link from many common sources to the URL Cleaner, it removes all that tracking shit for you, and copies the cleaned link to the clipboard.
- This belongs more on Technology and Privacy communities.
  I guess it was posted here to reach a broader audience.
  
  I'm upset, the tech and privacy communities need to step it up cause I've never seen this fact. I kinda knew URLs had a lot of junk, but I never knew what could be removed.

If you're still using firefox, right click -> copy clean link. works most of the time.

I usually just do it because shorter links look better than 30 lines of crap
- Right? The fact that this is an extra bit of tracking information I don't want makes this an easy sell for anyone looking for a reason to do this, but for me it's because it just makes links uglier.

Yep!
Only thing I want to see after a ? in a youtube url is t=4m20s
- personally i like v=aO82NftCga to be in there as well

ClearURLs was my go to on Firefox, I think it's still great but it gave me trouble on a couple of sites because it modified the url in the address bar (it was like AliExpress and shopee, Chinese e-commerce sites that look like a web dev vomited, so I hardly blame ClearURLs)
Firefox also now has "copy clean link" when you right click the url bar which also works great.
- Thanks. I didn't know about that. Although I tried doing it and the option was grayed out. Any idea what might be wrong? Do I need to change a setting or something? This was on youtube.
  
  I don't think YouTube actually has tracking parameters in the url normally, but if you use the share button then the youtu.be link will include the video ID as well tracking. But it looks like you can kinda use it there too if you select the link with tracking, it seems to detect that it's a link and offers the clean link option when you right click it.
  If you go to an Amazon item page then you should see it available when right clicking the address bar.
- I also use URLCheck on my phone. Made it the default browser and it pops up with options to clean the link and choose which browser to open it with
- Firefox also now has “copy clean link” when you right click the url bar which also works great.
  I am an avid and exclusive user of Firefox and I never discovered this because it never would have occurred to me in a million years to right click the URL bar for any reason. So I'll be damned; there it is. (I always just lasso the relevant part myself and hit ctrl + c.)

URLCheck
URLSanitizer
Also relevant:
LinkSheet
- Also leon

You all got Rick-rolled btw
- XcQ all the way!
  
  “XcQ, LINK STAYS BLUE!” 😁
- Only if they typed it in, but I appreciated a recognizable link!

I always do this when I post YouTube links. Be damned if I want to be associated with you lot! (Seriously though, it’s a good idea to do)

Just a reminded, if you have the Clipboard Manager called Ditto
You can strip those right out of your pasted URLs, even many at once !
(for windows users, for linux there is https://github.com/farzher/clipman but it lacks that particular feature at this time )

hey you, yeah you, you're finally awake

Thing I find funny is when the url seems to indicate you came from an email or something. Now if I share it, anyone who clicks will also count as coming from an email. Dumass ruining your own statistics

This is kinda true but also kinda fear mongering. UTM parameters are just to track where you clicked the link from. They're usually not dynamic, and don't contain anything about you personally. The example in the screenshot utm_source=newsletter is probably added to all links in a company's newsletter email, so they can tell that people get to the page via the newsletter.

If you run across a link with a regular "?utm_source=.." , that can not tell people anything about you. It simply tells the website "register one click onto this article coming from this specific newsletter we sent out". It does not tie this information to you.
With other tracking things, what is described here is absolutely possible though.

I like this to trim/handle redirects https://f-droid.org/packages/com.trianguloy.urlchecker/

I use an app called "Leon URL Cleaner" from F-Droid. Does a really good job removing tracking params, and only adds one extra step to sharing a URL.

Most of my internetin' is done on mobile, because I'm very rarely at my desk, and when I am, I'm normally working on school. Are there any solutions to handling this easily on mobile without having to manually erase part of the pasted link when I go to send it to someone? A few people have mentioned that's it's not 100% guaranteed that the anything after ? Is worthless, so I don't know how to ensure I'm not breaking a link
- I posted a comment above, but if you're android, check out leon. Super easy to use.

I am pretty sure firefox let's you remove trackers from url.
- yup, its a right click option

does anyone know what ?feature=shared does in youtube links and whether it's worth removing it?
- You can remove it, it tells YouTube how you got to that video. In this case someone shared it.
  
  Not very high priority to remove though. Nothing identfiable in the gran scheme I guess.

If you are using iOS, you can create a shortcut or download one of the premade shortcuts without any 3rd party apps :3
- Do you have a link to any of these :)

Brave for iOS has the Copy Clean Link option. There’s GNAT Cleaner from the App Store but I’ve never used it.
I tried adding screenshots but I haven’t been able to upload photos in almost a week.

This is so important, too many people don’t know about this.
But still this is not shitposting. God .world sucks. Ble

firefox has a right click option to remove those

I did not know what those were for before seeing this but I remeber seeing "source=chat_gpt" next to a link to a source in a news article and thought that it was odd.

I made a Firefox plugin that does this for you on YouTube. It's called "YouTube Clean Share" if anyone is interested

I'm on mobile so I will have to drop a link later (if ever)
but do a websearch for the utility link cleaner
It's awesome. Thank me later.

I just use Firefox focus

I generally do this with the exception of query terms that indicate I got the link from their RSS feed. Just want to make sure their statistics indicate that they should keep supporting it.

So how about when a link is shared on Lemmy or Reddit or FB? Do the latter strip out the identifiers, or does that one person's reshared post associate them with the clicks of thousands of others?
For web links, they'd also be able to find the source from the referrer tags etc

Could maybe have a bit of fun randomising those strings.

Thank you so much for this notice. I use the copy doesn’t link option in Firefox but when sharing links from other applications it doesn’t have that feature.