[netcraft]

a service expanding that link one time to give you the underlying static url without tracking before sharing is far better than even one real person clicking it, wouldnt you agree? the trackers would know at least one person clicked it but thats about it?

[ronjouch]

To you and sibling comment: oooookay, you're thinking from the position of an obfuscated link sharer/sender, not receiver.

You want ClearURLs (or something else) to always resolve to a canonical link, so that you're easily able to share this canonical URL, and to never have a tracked URL in your URL bar so that you don't share it by mistake. Makes sense.

[jtbayly]

Precisely. Just because we can't stop unique URLs from being created doesn't mean we should just keep using them ourselves.

[jacurtis]

This works if the sender of the shortened link wants to protect other's privacy preemptively. Then they could certaintly follow the link, log a single click, then grab the final url and share that.

But the average person isn't going to do that. They will share the nice, short, pretty url that tiktok gives them. But once someone gives you that shortened url, there is no way for you to view the video on the other end of that URL without being tracked. You would need to follow the link, tiktok would track you, only after they have logged the data will they send your browser a redirect to the proper url.

[jtbayly]

Unless your computer looks up the Url from a service.