hexbear

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Now that the old Hexbear fork has been officially abandoned, this community will be used as a space for meta-discussion on the site itself.

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We should get on top of the link tracking problem (hexbear.net)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I've noticed a rise in people sharing links to YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and reddit that include tracking parameters in the URL.

It might largely be harmless for now, but it's not good to let companies build a web of links between users of this site, and to link the usernames of users on this site to their off-site accounts, which may include sensitive info.

SM	URL Part	Appearance in URL	Filtration technique
Youtube	Query	?si=*	Remove query string
Instagram	Query	?igshid=*	Remove query string
Twitter	Query	?t=	Remove query string
Tiktok	Subdomain and path	(vm/vt).tiktok.com/(random_string)	Block
reddit	Path	/(sub_name)/s/(random_string)	Block

This site should only allow canonical links to the content to limit the information exposed.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Firefox started to have "copy without site tracking" on right click as an option.

Doesn't always work, but at least it's something. There might websites that do that too, but people here also forget to use archive links so idk how enforceable it is.

At least there's the bot comments that do a private front end for links to big sites sometimes, but yeah people should be more careful about helping to build shadow profiles that'll probably exist regardless.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago

Doesn't always work, but at least it's something

The ClearURLs extension has a very robust link copying tool, but I think if we're relying on the users to have initiative about link cleaning then we're only as private as the least compliant users on this site.