privacy

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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] 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.