Add this URL Shortener filterlist to uBlock Origin.
This removes the fast majority of these query parameters.The only way to be safe and private online is to not be online.
Legitimate concern, called URL tracking. There’s browser extensions for that.
This. The question marks and ampersand in youtube URLs are separators and can include your entire playlist, as well. If you just want to share the video, then everything from the first ampersand onwards can go.
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! 💜
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)
Even better: https://youtu.be/PtSGclOlVmg
This is what I meant by the “non shortened” ones. If you’re using it through the app you can only press share to get the link and that’s how it comes when you press share. (Or if you press share on the website instead of copying the URL from the address bar.)
Even better: PeerTube or InternetArchive or (Web)Torrents but definitely not a Google website fueled by surveillance capitalism.
Call me back when the experience as a content creator is not a nightmare, the experience as a user browsing for content is not a nightmare, when it can handle the load of an even moderately popular video.
The issue with streaming video online is not a technical one; making a “clone” of youtube, anyone can do so (and indeed, peertube exists). The issue with streaming video online is that if it gets traction, you need a lot of bandwidth and processing power to make it available when it needs to be available. One-two instances and “hopping P2P picks up” does not cut it.
And, as usual when anyone says anything bad about peertube: the idea is great, but almost by construction it lacks what’s needed to be a valid replacement for centralized, yet HUGE existing platforms: traction, and a truckload of CDN-like instances that can handle the load. If someone putting highly anticipated content online could just “put” their video somewhere and send a link so people can watch it, immediately, and without issue, some would likely do so. Unfortunately, we’re very far from that yet.
For a viewer: serious lack of content
For a creator: extremely unlikely to make a living
I want them to succeed but it’s an unfortunate position
Be the change you want to see. Here is my instance https://video.benetou.fr/ even if nobody cares, I tried.
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.
How about I just don’t use you tube? I should be ok.
It’s on a lot of links
It is and it should stop. I’m honestly almost to the point of leaving so much interneting behind so I can regain my skills at old school communication and information gathering. It must be so hard to do that now. It used to be so normal.
I already have bonked all traditional social media including for my small business for reasons like this. I went back to posters and flyers and only promoting online solely in spaces like the fed. It’s been hard but worthwhile I feel and after only about a year I am again getting more traffic. It’s just a small income source but it’s been an interesting foray into change.
I usually change the parameters to things like utm_source=yourmom, just for kicks.
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.
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
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.
Sure, because it’s super fun to parse a path with multiple keypair that can be repeated, be non mandatory, etc. You must work for the GS1 project.
Developers are known to enjoy whipping themselves all the time, constantly trying to do obtuse things with the wrong tool when there’s a perfectly working, perfectly standard way of doing something that’s supported by literally every solutions under the sun.
/s, just in case.
It’s shitty advice masquerading as something useful and/or insightful.
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.
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
