2w ago

It is my practice to delete the hash lines after question marks in URLS to defeat tracking... but the question mark has disappeared

Please accept this in the ethos of no stupid questions.

The only programming I do is to defy tracking by deleting hash lines after ? In the url.

Some popular sites I am embarrassed to admit to even viewing have found a way around this by offering me share links without the ?.

It’s Instagram I am ashamed to mention.

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

14 comments

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.

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)

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.

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.
- Yep, I love it. I told my wife about it and she thinks I'm crazy.

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).

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.

- It's not about defeating tracking of yourself, but who you share the link to, your relationship with them.
  Without that tracking parameter, if the URL is common among many people (which it usually is, since usually one thing has one URL for everyone), then it's impossible to know who shared to who.
  If you have the tracking parameter, then the service can know that you shared the URL, as well as who you shared it to, being able to put that information together and thus built more of a profile on your social connections.
- Just because something isnt perfect doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. Would you rather OP share links with tracking?

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.
- Okay… can you help me delete the tracking in this link?
  https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=W_svsNc6seE
  Is the tracking piece after the second equals?
  
  Query parameters follow everything after the ? and take the format a=foo&b=bar. Essentially, key value pairs using = and separated by &.
  There's no perfect way to know what is and isn't part of a tracking stuff. We just use our intuition. In this case, when we look at a YouTube video we see links like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ. Notice the v=xxx? So, in the URL you shared, we can deduce that v=W_svsNc6seE is needed and the si=xxx is the tracking stuff. You should also then remove the & because it's no longer separating two entries. Leaving it doesn't seem to hurt anything though. So https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=W_svsNc6seE without &si=22MYOxMc5wMcdatU.
  I don't know what si stands for, but in my head I see it as "share ID". A lot of services use si or something similar for the tracking stuff.

14 comments