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this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2023
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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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Friends and family don't know what cleaning a URL means. Nobody does.
And ironic that OP doesn't share how to clean them.
Because it's different for every website.
There's a lot of common patterns, but you have to understand how URLs work. You have to recognize which URL parameters are tracking ones or even just might be tracking. And that means you have to know how they work and that takes a moment.
In brief, URL parameters start after a ? in the URL and are formatted like key1=values&key2=value2. You can't usually remove all parameters because not all are tracking. To further complicate things, URLs can also have an anchor starting with a # character which will be after the URL parameters. You often don't want to remove that (though theoretically the anchor could in fact contain tracking details).
It's often trial and error to see which parameters you can remove. I do this a lot since I write a lot of technical documentation. Clean URLs make the documentation more compact and less likely to break. It's not just tracking stuff, but sometimes you need to remove temporal data that makes a page display data from a specific time when you want it to just default to the current time (etc).
I mean, you can just install ClearURLs on Firefox for both desktop and Android and it will cover 99% of cases completely automatically without any technical knowledge.
On YouTube links, delete anything after the ?
Someone post the next website
That's terrible advice, you'd just be left with
https://youtube.com/watch
You need the "?v=" and the jumble of letters immediately after.
For example: https://youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
XcQ, link stays blue
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/watch
https://piped.video/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Now that is even better! That is clean! :-D
They're talking about the query param that gets added when using the Share button: https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ?si=dwX01vG-EivlOoYe - the ?si=... should be removed.
That shit is so annoying and they just started to add it.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/dQw4w9WgXcQ?si=dwX01vG-EivlOoYe
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I have memorized this link so I know what is rickroll without opening it.
Is it really? It reliably protects people from all the garbage content on youtube.
Wait shit you're right. I'm too used to the mobile links that have the ID after the slash
already too much work for normies
www.urlex.org
also kinda common sense if you know anything about urls
Remove everything after the question mark.
This may work for sharing links to static content, but it is terrible advice for anything interactive. That removes all URL params and will break lots of interactive sites.
What would be considered interactive vs static? How would I explain that to someone, for example?
Most things you share will be static. These are things like news articles and webcomics where the output of the page is always the same no matter what you do. Things like google searches or YouTube links that are different depending on some way you interact with the site are dynamic. If you search for “apples” in google you’ll get different results than if you search for “oranges.” If you share the apple search with someone, your apple text will be coded as a parameter after the ?. If you strip that off they’d go to google.com and not see any apples. Trackers and other surveillance tools are also captured in the query params so for dynamic content it can be tricky to know which params to remove and which to keep. For static content you can just remove them all because the content doesn’t change based on the params you pass it
Very helpful, thank you
Like a YouTube link with a timecode, for example
Try it on a Google search results page
I'm not responsible for their shite code
That’s just how http requests work though. It’s not their code it’s…the internet
If your url for a single item is a paragraph long - often repeating itself - and including shit that can be handled by css that is absolutely shit code. Temu is a particularly batshit example of this.
Ok but that isn’t the most common reason for url params
Ok but why are we pretending that's what people are sharing? We're talking about stripping garbage out of URLS when c&p. People are sharing static links - purchasable items, a funny video or a meme - if these links break when you remove additional constructs, then what the hell are you doing?
No, absolutely everything has to be a separate URL!
^/s^
Oh god could you imagine? Combinatorial explosion
Because I don't expect the target audience to be here in /c/privacy
You don't think anyone is here to learn how to be more private on the Internet? You just expect everyone to already know everything
Look, the point is that I've tried explaining it to friends and family and whoever want (and don't want) to listen.
This post is a rant / wishful thinking as stated as being so, I'm not in the mood of explaining everything again. I've done that in my personal blog, etc.
Well, that's plain ignorant. But you do you.
Rants are rants, that’s fine imo
How so? This is a rant post, I'm not trying to present it differently.
You're good, no worries. You created a lot of dialog, and most of it is helpful. I'm not complaining.
Thanks. Looking back, maybe I should've at least explained about it a little more. At the time I just wanted to blow off some steam.
I could have worded my response better myself.
I'm looking forward to your next rant, tbh
No but that's what the comments are for. I share if the discussion is relevant.
Don't worry mate. I've never heard the term but I knew exactly what you meant. I cleaned a url earlier today for Lemmy.