It’s not always nefarious.
I work for a non-profit. Sometimes it’s helpful to understand the click rate on a mass message.
We don’t provide data to third parties and use a self-hosted oss analytics platform.
So I think folks should understand tracking and manage it but it’s not all bad. Just almost always bad. Really bad.
Worse: a lot of links can’t be fixed or modified since they use click-through services to obscure the destination.
I’m a web developer in a marketing department and agreed UTM tags aren’t really nefarious. We generally use them to track campaigns, and to see the effectiveness of our paid campaigns. (As in how much of a return on investment did we have, are people continuing to traverse the site after hitting the landing page, etc) That said those codes generally don’t give us any info about the user other than what parts of the site you are hitting, (which we can find out through other means anyway). There are tools out there which can give us a creepy amount of data about the users on the site, but UTMs aren’t it.
Removing them when sending out links is good practice as you probably only really need a fraction of the characters in order to get to the site, so your links are cleaner, you look like less of an idiot, and ironically marketers will end up having cleaner data (I doubt you care about this, but it’s true.)
That said, if you really want to prevent sites from getting your data when browsing turning off JavaScript in your browser would probably have the biggest impact.
I usually change the parameters to things like utm_source=yourmom, just for kicks.
Add made up data to those parameters. Like source=ericsschmidtspedoisland
PSA if you are worried about link parameters giving away where you came from, you should really be worried about HTTP Referrer headers, which are of course turned on by default in most browsers. Be advised turning them off may break some (parts of) certain websites, but most still work fine in my experience.
In Firefox go to about:config page and set
network.http.sendRefererHeaderto 0.Or change them to 127.0.0.1 and get rid of some web app firewalls and restrictions
Not everything after the
?can be removed. Obvious and well known example, YouTube videos use the video as part of the query parameters (on non shortened URLs). https://youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQOne small error on an otherwise very useful post! 💜
I judge people based on whether they can understand youtube (which you should be changing to invidious or something else anyway) urls. It’s a useful and very short way to see if people have ever paid attention to repeated patterns. The moment I saw the t=XYs, I was amazed.
Fun fact, YouTube has backwards comparability for its video links, so https://youtube.com/w/dQw4w9WgXcQ will go to the same video (granted, it will change format to the up to date one, but it is one way to go to a yt video without URL arguments)
On iOS / iPadOS , you can use a Siri Shortcut called Clean URLs.
Just share the URL with the shortcut, through the share sheet option, and your clean url is automatically copied into the clipboard.
Everything after the “?” symbol can be removed without issue
https://youtube.com/watch?v=XfELJU1mRMg >>> https://youtube.com/watch
this isn’t a shitpost this community is being dragged through the mud by non-shitposts
Actually, it’s a a bit of a shitpost. Anything after the ‘?’ is an argument for the html request. Can and is used for tracking, but is also used for website functionality.
IMO, any developer who uses URL parameters for required functionality is short sighted. They should use the path as required parameters.
There are URL shortener Apps on F-Droid. Simple share the link to this app and get a short link without this privacy mess.
Make sure you choose a proper open source one, else the app might collect data as well…
Check out this cool video
Time to put new privacy laws in place or force politicans to do it
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=newsletteris probably added to all links in a company’s newsletter email, so they can tell that people get to the page via the newsletter.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.
If you’re still using firefox, right click -> copy clean link. works most of the time.
URL Cleaner on f-droid.org is a great app too!
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.
