Friends and family don't know what cleaning a URL means. Nobody does.
this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2023
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Privacy
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And ironic that OP doesn't share how to clean them.
Because it's different for every website.
There's a lot of common patterns, but you have to understand how URLs work. You have to recognize which URL parameters are tracking ones or even just might be tracking. And that means you have to know how they work and that takes a moment.
In brief, URL parameters start after a ? in the URL and are formatted like key1=values&key2=value2. You can't usually remove all parameters because not all are tracking. To further complicate things, URLs can also have an anchor starting with a # character which will be after the URL parameters. You often don't want to remove that (though theoretically the anchor could in fact contain tracking details).
It's often trial and error to see which parameters you can remove. I do this a lot since I write a lot of technical documentation. Clean URLs make the documentation more compact and less likely to break. It's not just tracking stuff, but sometimes you need to remove temporal data that makes a page display data from a specific time when you want it to just default to the current time (etc).
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I had someone watch me edit a URL in the address bar and she clearly thought I was just fucking around, because there was no possible way that any human could edit the Matrix language up there and accomplish anything productive.
That's part of my point. Most people just don't know.
That's like telling someone to just tune their carburator.
inb4 you get an indignant reply suggesting that carburetor tuning is a must-have skill for absolutely anyone who owns anything that has one
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I mean carburetor tuning is a must-have skill for absolutely anyone who has one. Otherwise you can never be sure that you are getting an ideal fuel-air mixture, and the ratio changes over time with the temperature, humidity, seasons, etc. Really, it's irresponsible to not know how to do this if you have a car with a carburetor.
Brake line bleeding is a must-have skill for anyone with brakes. Otherwise you can never be sure not to have air in the brake lines. Really it's irresponsible not to know how to do this if you have a vehicle with idraulic brakes.
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They don't necessarily need to; hopefully we can help people install uBlock Origin which removes tracking query parameters from URLs. See privacy.txt
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Thankfully uBlock Origin removes those parameters for us.
The default filters include a whole bunch of removeparam filters; e.g. privacy.txt
See also removeparam.
Maybe you could help your friends and family install Firefox and/or uBlock Origin? Every little bit helps :)
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To be honest 99% of people, certainly including me, probably don't recognize tracking elements in a URL unless they're like affiliate links.
If people were really good at removing that info, they'd probably create a unique hash including all that data that we wouldn't be able to edit.
I mean, I've seen companies start shortening links with the tracking info inside it. Amazon and Spotify are ones I see frequently
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Phones and chrome are designed to prevent people from noticing that they're being tracked and helping big tech track others
It's not just safer, they're nicer to look at too. I hate seeing a 20 character URL followed by a ? and 200 characters.
Edit: 
product links are a major offender here.
Agreed. Recently youtube started adding tracking parameters (?si=) to their share links. I always clean them up.
Indeed. I use Léon on Android, very straightforward, open source, and easy to install and configure...
Nice. I personally prefer using this one: https://github.com/TrianguloY/UrlChecker
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This would be a good feature add to Lemmy. Clean pre-post.
Yeah I always mention it when people send a link with all the extra stuff, how you can usually delete everything past the question mark
Some apps are hiding it behind shortened URLs. So it looks clean, but if you expand it, then oh boy.
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People barely know what a browser is, you cant expect them to know what an url is, let alone what clearing it is
People generally don't care (I myself am not at the level of this community). It also involves enough technical know-how that most people won't care. It's like asking people to use a CLI, not going to happen. I'm pretty sure I'm one of the few people who still C&P URLs to share, most people hit a "Share" button.
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If you get them to install ClearUrls in their browser (Firefox, not Firefox), they can copy/paste URLs directly from their URL bar and the URL will be clean with no extra effort.
I keep it enabled in all my browser profiles pretty much always
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https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/master/LegitimateURLShortener.txt
Add that to people you know Ublock lists
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Interesting, I never really thought about this before. I wonder if there’s a clipboard manager that does this automatically?
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I wish websites would clean their URLs
The OCD part of me really wants to clean up those URLs simply because the link becomes a massive novella of garbage that's harder to read than Yu-Gi-Oh card text.
I thought I was alone in my windmill-tilting on this one! Nice to see there are others who clean URLs of unnecessary querystring parameters
I do this because I hate super long URL's, but is this actually a problem for privacy? Does it not actually fuck with the tracking because now two separate people have got the same tracking Params? (Genuine question).
Nope. It's a nightmare. The ad company now knows that you are friends or family
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I try to do it. Mainly i see a lot of ?utm_source shit and kill it.
On Android, LinkSheet supports cleaning URLs. It's an awesome tool in general.
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Filter cleaner should be built into the browser.
I use URLCheck on Android, and recommend it. I hate the nasty vomit URLs that people share, and I always click a URL and open with URLCheck (no defaults set for anything on phone) before opening it with my browser, NewPipe or whatever else.
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unfortunately most people don't know what a url is.
gui was a mistake, or something.
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