Oh my fucking god i was already annoyed at having to fix links because of privacy nerds getting mad about tracking referrals, now they are adding public doxxing too? great
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2026
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Chapotraphouse
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Yeah its crazy that they thought this was something people would want. Like it just pops up on the screen "Hey want to DM the person who sent you this?" basically
Never have I wanted to do that.
I think it would be worthwhile for lemmy to auto-remove and/or auto-reject is and si in you youtube URLs
agree
Luckily my youtube account is the same one that I just use to post archived ugene dabs memes
Doing the Lord's work
I miss comrade Dabs.
I've already seen some people accidentally expose their real names because of this. Idk what kind of idiot thought this feature was a good idea
The person who realised how much money they could make off of targeted advertising through it.
told you so
username checks out lol
they hated me because i spoke the truth
I miss her
Personally I fix it by just not having an account. FreeTube gets the job done and they can't track an account that doesn't exist.
I don't rely on that because YT is often breaking the open clients, but anonymous browsers like Firefox Focus always work.
It's good to have options, and control - which URL Check gives you.
I kind of like that it breaks sometimes. It's my signal to go do something more productive than watching youtube lol.
PipePipe is the new hotness btw. Its a fork of new pipe
Can someone explain why there's 100 different forks of NewPipe? Isn't NewPipe the OG? Is there something wrong with it?
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Is that an independent browser?
No, from Mozilla itself. I use an app from F-Droid called FFUpdater to install it and keep it up to date without using the Google Play version.
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freetube should mitigate this and has other improvements too, at the cost of occasionally being broken by google.
For all share links:
- copy link
- paste into incognito tab
- go to expand the url
- delete every unnecessary url parameter. For YouTube, all that is necessary is the
v=abc123to identify the video
I habitually remove query strings. They're only necessary in rare instances when they include a token or something.
Interestingly, I don't have the "channel visibility for shared links" option in my privacy settings.
i didn't have the option on desktop but did on mobile app. switching the option on for mobile did nothing for the tracking link when clicking share on desktop.
I've actually never clicked the share button. I always right click the video to copy the URL. I guess that was the right move.
The identifier is the ?is=xxxabc123 remove that.
my broswer has a "copy without parameters" option in the context menu, and there's no reason for desktop users to ever use the "share" button.
Spotify does this too I believe.
I'm finding my choice to delete all accounts for any service and only use things that let me go without an email attached has been a very good choice. Why the fuck does spotify need a social network? It feels like we're approaching the day where grocery stores start posting your face next to all the stuff you bought on a big screen after checkout and announcing it to the store. It's not even a lack of privacy where companies and the govt want to see everything. They want the whole world to know everything you do.
I self host this on my home server now for the exact reasons you’re talking about https://www.navidrome.org/
I use mp3s and just use syncthing to keep them all synced between my devices.
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You might want to add a CW to that video for all the hitlerite bullshit you see on screen throughout
I will add one I had listened to it without really looking oops
welp, at least it's avoidable for now instead of being hashed inside identifier (it adds a tracker after a video link)
Always use clean links! Although we should really be using tankie.tube anyway. If you want to share a youtube video, download it with yt-dlp and upload to tankie.tube.
Somebody who is very cool and good should set up a page that can do it for you server-side
but sadly all it takes is one moment of not thinking of it and someone posts a youtube link to Hexbear and doxxes their google account which is linked to their real identity usually. For a commie site where opsec matters that's a big concern.
always be privatemodemaxxing on social media, if clean-links extension is not working for (say) phone
@dessalines@lemmy.ml is this something that lemmy could automatically check for on post submission as a feature?
We're using a crate a community member created called clearurls to scrub all markdown fields and url type links of tracking params before even inserting them to the DB. It uses the ClearUrls data which is really popular.
It might already work for these links, but I don't know. Someone would need to test it on https://voyager.lemmy.ml/ . If it doesn't, we'd just need to check the clearurls data (I'm fairly positive they've accounted for this already a long time ago), and update the crate.
Okay I tested it and yes, lemmy is already scrubbing these. See, I'm trying to insert an &si=eaetah right now and it doesn't write it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKu9eEZe88Q
Kinda surprised no one thought to even test this out.
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Yeah I noticed that "si=" parameter a few months back and wondered what the hell it was.
I know it doesn't help for apps but clearURLs addon has been great for removing tracking garbage automatically when I want to share something https://github.com/ClearURLs/Addon
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