slazer2au@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Tldr, anything after a ‘?’ In a url is unnecessary.
It’s getting worse though
Recently I’ve noticed Reddit links from friends looking like
reddit.com/r/example/s/1234567
Which then redirects to the actual reddit.com/r/example/post/comments/1938473
I believe Spotify and Tiktok do short links like that too. If you’re on android, URLCheck can wrangle those links to find the actual content without the trackers. On web / iOS, I’m not sure
I haven’t checked how reddit does this but just from the example or seems like there is no anti tracking from the use of urlcheck that you’re describing.
reddit appears to generate tracking link with a specific numeric identifier in their database, so instead of attaching a bunch of removable url parameters they instead do a lookup in their database and then redirect to the original destination.
this also means your app checking the redirect will need to fetch the url to determine the destination, which means their tracking still works just fine.
I’ve been meaning to look into how the URL expansion works. If it happened on the device then I guess it doesn’t help much, but if it happens elsewhere it might fix the tracking?
It might also limit how much identifying information is attached to it. If the original link opens in my app, then they can tie accounts together. If it’s wrangled by a third party app, then I open the clean link, they just get my IP address
If the goal is to share clean links, getting the it’ll url after the redirect accomplishes it. The tracking that’s done isn’t on your friends/whoever you share the link with, but with the app. Which does generally defeat the purpose of their tracking.
true, my comment was primarily from the perspective of the recipient of tracking links
On YouTube, adding &t=37s makes the video start at 37 seconds in. It is pretty useful.
That is the full extent of my coding knowledge.
I don’t know why “amp;” appeared. I didn’t write it and it is not necessary. It’s just the and symbol. Followed by t=__s
& is just the HTML entity for &.
Not true on every site. Try it in your browser without the query string first before assuming that’s the case. The app I work on, for instance, uses the query string to set date/time ranges and filter data.
Except when it’s not.
Though I’ve always wondered if that’s always consistently the case, and when that’s not the case is there any mostly consistent way to identify the separator symbol in the URL text strings :/
Nemo@midwest.social 11 months ago
Not always, but it’s a good rule of thumb.