What do I do to get rid of the tracking now?

You stop using these services.

I’m a programmer, and if they generate page URLs that are unique to you with your tracking baked in, do not allow you to view the page non-logged in, then there’s no way to get rid of it, short of hacking their servers/databases.

If you can view it without an account, then you just browse without an account, without using a browser that has a unique fingerprint. So basically use something like the Tor one. Unfortunately for Instagram, I think both is not possible.

Of course it might be like the other comment says, it’s only the special share URL that is like this, and the one you browse around normally isn’t. Then you just use that one.

With TikTok, if you copy and paste the URL into a browser you will get a link you can then copy and paste without the baked-in tracking. You can probably do the same with Instagram, but I just got a link from them and they had the tracking under a query parameter (that’s the technical term for the stuff after the question mark). So I’m not sure what you’re seeing.

Also, thank you for stripping tracking data off of links you share. “It ain’t much, but it’s honest work!”

https://www.tiktok.com/t/aaaa becomes https://www.tiktok.com/@someuser/video/111 (manually remove tracking as before). I assume this might work with Instagram, but like I said, when I try it, it doesn’t actually give me that style URL.

Don’t use the share with shortened url. Copy the page url instead.

Otherwise (you’ll have to) accept that you don’t know what’s included in the shortened link.

it’s similar with amazon/booking - if you use their share button, you get a neater shortened url but tracking is baked in. but you can still just copy the url from the browser search bar instead (which, acknowledged, might particularly not work well for IG)

also, don’t use Notes to try to remove the query parameters. apple is fucking idiotic and made it almost impossible to actually delete the query parameters. I literally tried for like 15 minutes the other day and it was incredible how it would completely ignore me deleting the query parameters and just resave exactly what I had originally input (even if I long pressed and chose edit). It’s just easier to repaste it back into safari or whatever and delete it there.

Chances are they are doing something similar to URL shortening where a reference to the destination and the tracking info is either hashed into the URL directly or stored elsewhere behind whatever ID is in the URL.

Unshortening tools can fetch the actual URL (with any tracking params) in a private context.

I have no idea if anything exists on iOS, but on Android there are tools like URL Check which replace your default browser and let you un-short or otherwise manipulate URLs before opening in a browser or sharing.

You should be able to visit the post via a web browser that’s not signed in and get a direct URL. Also just don’t link to IG when possible (I know you probably have your reasons but throwing that out there).

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