Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

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I wish more people clean URLs before sharing it to others. (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by narwhal@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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I see a lot of people, including friends and family, sharing URLs rife with tracking parameters.

I feel alone in making sure that I'm sharing the cleanest possible URLs to others. For example, checking if the URLs are shortened to hide plenty of tracking params.

Just need to vent, thanks for reading.

Edit: adding some context for future references.

By using url tracking params, tech companies can track who shares the content and who clicks on that specific shared urls. A simple but effective tracking method.

Try sharing Instagram post or YouTube video from the apps.

Instagram adds 'igshid=' . YouTube adds 'si='.

If you share the same IG or YouTube content from different accounts. The 'igshid', 'si' value will be different.

This can be used to tag who shares it, and who clicks on that specific url param value.

TikTok hides a ton of such params behind shortened url. Try expanding tiktok shared urls.

If you use android, use this app to expand, analyze and clean up urls https://github.com/TrianguloY/UrlChecker

If you use Firefox (you should), install ublock origin and add this url tracking filter maintained by adguard: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AdguardTeam/FiltersRegistry/master/filters/filter_17_TrackParam/filter.txt

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[–] QuazarOmega@lemy.lol 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I wouldn't go as far as to say that once two people have clicked on the same tracking link the company behind it can tell what your relation is directly. What they will know is that the two or more people are connected in some way, to then infer in what way, they need other circumstantial data, maybe they have an account on that website and they share the surname or, even easier, without account they can tell that the requests came from IPs that come from a circumscribed area, and on and on, the more data points you add the better predictions the company can make.
If several IPs from disparate places in the world use the same link they can probably tell that the link was shared on social media, not knowing which one, but it was sent in a public internet space at least