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Big tech and governments are monitoring and recording your eating activities. c/Privacy provides tips and tricks to protect your privacy against global surveillance.

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PSA: You might be unknowingly doxxing yourself by sharing links containing trackers (lemmy.ca)

submitted 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Earlier today I came across a Reddit comment with a link to an Instagram post. The link had ?igsh= at the end.

When I clicked on the link, I got this popup. It had a name and profile photo that was different from that of the post being shared.

Join Firstname Lastname on Instagram

See photos, videos, and more from Firstname Lastname.

[ Open Instagram ]

not now

I avoid link trackers. However, I did not realize it was this bad.

To my knowledge, TikTok does the same thing and lists the name of the person that shared the link. Assuming this increases engagement, any website could enable such a feature, even on old links that you shared in the past.

You should manually remove any trackers before sharing, or use an app for it.

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[–] [email protected] 68 points 4 weeks ago (4 children)

Firefox has an option called copy link without trackers on their desktop version which covers a lot of this.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 weeks ago (3 children)

It doesn't cover YouTube link trackers :/

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 weeks ago

Yeah I was surprised about it. That tracking parameter is one that I notice the most and almost everyone includes it. It made me think that feature is either broken, or in misunderstanding what it supposed to do.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

I use an extension that handles A LOT of these unneeded parameters for me on desktop FF, and on Android i use an app that does some processing on URLs, among it cleaning URLs, as my default browser so it gets to URLs before i open any. This saves me some manual handling.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 weeks ago

ClearURLs is the only thing that works for me. Adguard and Firefox have tracking removal features, but they don't seem to work most of the time.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 weeks ago

Untracker lets you copy links on Android without tracking parameters, but it's so annoying in YouTube. I have to click the share button to get the fake YouTube share menu and then swipe past preferred options that I never use to reach the "more" option that reveals the real share menu and then select Untracker to see the link and then it gives me the option to copy (for sharing) or share (which also gives the option to copy). Often going through this process causes YouTube to stop playing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

It does remove ?feature=shared and ?si=... from youtu.be links. Maybe not from youtube.com links, though I'm not sure how people get those in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Pipepipe share just gives YouTube.com links. Like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUUy3mnAhCE

Is there tracking in that URL?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 weeks ago

Nope, that's clean. HUUy3mnAhCE is just the ID of the video itself, not a unique identifier for your sharing of this video.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 weeks ago

Safari too, part of default tracking prevention, though both browsers miss a lot of tracker types, so extensions are still needed to handle the rest.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 weeks ago

Firefox has an option called copy link without trackers

Thunderbird also does that . (Not surprising since it's also a Mozilla project)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 weeks ago

Most browsers do but it's literally never worked for me. There is a very popular browser extension that will strip them though.