cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/31187638
Earlier today I came across a Reddit comment with a link to an Instagram post. The link had
?igsh=at the end.When I clicked on the link, I got this popup. It had a name and profile photo that was different from that of the post being shared.
Join Firstname Lastname on Instagram
See photos, videos, and more from Firstname Lastname.
[ Open Instagram ]
not now
I avoid link trackers. However, I did not realize it was this bad.
To my knowledge, TikTok does the same thing and lists the name of the person that shared the link. Assuming this increases engagement, any website could enable such a feature, even on old links that you shared in the past.
You should manually remove any trackers before sharing, or use an app for it.
There’s gotta be an extension that does do a good job, right?
Firefox already has a copy without tracking built in
The problem is that these parameters can also do useful things, i.e. removing them might break the link. There’s no inherent criteria to determine whether a parameter is used for tracking or not.
The way these extensions or Firefox’ built-in feature works, is that they check for ‘well-known’ parameters. For example, lots of URLs contain parameters starting with
utm_, which is from Google Analytics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTM_parametersAs such, it’s for example unlikely that someone would build a website which uses a parameter
utm_mediumwith a value ofsocial, without it being used for tracking, so that gets removed.But if someone builds a website that puts your full name into a parameter called
potato, there’s just no way to automatically detect and remove that.