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.
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.
candybrie@lemmy.world 7 months ago
example@reddthat.com 7 months ago
true, my comment was primarily from the perspective of the recipient of tracking links
otter@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
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