Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by userbinator 1871 days ago
With websites, at least you can just copy the URL from the address bar and clean it. Of course, people are being slowly dumbed down by browser's (mostly Chrome, but Firefox seems to follow its stupid trends not long afterwards) attempts at removing or hiding the URL, which is no surprise when you realise that herding the userbase to use dedicated "share" buttons (complete with tracking) is one of the reasons they're doing that.
1 comments
DangerousPie 1871 days ago
What's to stop a website to do the same thing with the URLs in your address bar?
link
ryankrage77 1871 days ago
They absolutely do that, but when you copy-paste them to share elsewhere, you can manually strip all the tracking info out.

For example, when I search Google for 'Hacker News', the URL I arrive at is "https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=hacker+ne...". If I want to send that to a friend, I would edit the link to be "https://www.google.com/search?q=hacker+news".

The dedicated share buttons will often give you a link generated on the fly, with all the tracking info on the back end. For example, if google was to do this (which they thankfully don't), the link might look like "google.com/?query=cce1602b-5af6-4d95-965b-e88450afc266", and in the database there would be all sorts of tracking info tied to it. I can't edit that URL to dissaciate from that information, so if I share it, they would know it was me who shared it, and not someone else visiting it on their own.

Of course, companies can and do track you via less obvious means all the time, but this is just one small way you can foul a data point for them.

link
Black101 1870 days ago
> They absolutely do that, but when you copy-paste them to share elsewhere, you can manually strip all the tracking info out.

If they create custom urls for everyone that look like https://website.com/uuid/ and don't redirect you to the real url... it is not possible to strip anything unless you do some research to find another URL that redirects you to the same page. Not sure what that would do to your search engine rankings though...

link