Telling people to remove them isn’t very practical. Educating people is step 1, but step 2 is finding a browser extension or browser that scrubs the identifiers from URLs. You will inevitably forget to remove the tracker from the url if you do it manually.

No no no no, keep em up, I can hack them and decrypt and do nasty things with that silly part of ~~code~~ link, to learn so much about our lovely friendship. And I promise I would never use that to harm You, really! hahahahahahahahaa

Does anyone want to talk about the "share with Facebook" and other similar social media links that track you?

No?

Cool. Cool cool cool cool cool cool cool cool cool

This tip really doesn't let me down, turns around and desert me

"everything after the ? Symbol can be removed without issue" is a bold statement to make. Reminds me when the TV news had a specialist telling people to look at urls before clicking and check if it ends with ".php" as that would mean it is a virus.

Don't some browsers do this automatically?

I've been using URL Check on Android to clean links of crap like this.

Not everything after the ? can be removed. Obvious and well known example, YouTube videos use the video as part of the query parameters (on non shortened URLs). https://youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

One small error on an otherwise very useful post! 💜

They are called query parameters and they are used for other things as well. So you can remove the ones you see similar to these but sometimes there might be important stuff you need to get the page to load in those parameters.

Add this URL Shortener filterlist to uBlock Origin.
This removes the fast majority of these query parameters.

I usually change the parameters to things like utm_source=yourmom, just for kicks.

Legitimate concern, called URL tracking. There's browser extensions for that.

Why is this a shitpost? It's absolutely correct and factual.

It’s not always nefarious.

I work for a non-profit. Sometimes it’s helpful to understand the click rate on a mass message.

We don’t provide data to third parties and use a self-hosted oss analytics platform.

So I think folks should understand tracking and manage it but it’s not all bad. Just almost always bad. Really bad.

Worse: a lot of links can’t be fixed or modified since they use click-through services to obscure the destination.

So annoying to always have to find out how far you can trim a URL before it breaks.

Everything after the "?" symbol can be removed without issue

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XfELJU1mRMg >>> https://youtube.com/watch

this isn't a shitpost this community is being dragged through the mud by non-shitposts

Everything after the ? can be safely removed

This is usually true but but not always. There's often times when a URL query like that is used to choose the page to load. I believe wordpress does this

If you're still using firefox, right click -> copy clean link. works most of the time.

edit: on desktop, idk if mobile supports it or not. Good suggestions below though for mobile.

Add made up data to those parameters. Like source=ericsschmidtspedoisland

I usually just do it because shorter links look better than 30 lines of crap

Check out this cool video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?

This is kinda true but also kinda fear mongering. UTM parameters are just to track where you clicked the link from. They're usually not dynamic, and don't contain anything about you personally. The example in the screenshot utm_source=newsletter is probably added to all links in a company's newsletter email, so they can tell that people get to the page via the newsletter.