[theturtletalks]

Exactly but companies have started hijacking the copy icon button as well. You’d think that would just copy what’s in the text box, but they add tracking and other stuff.

The worst is the YouTube share button. You can share the button with the exact second mark in the video and I would do that. Then one time I noticed the URL was shortened and added a lot of tracking.

[joshstrange]

Nothing bugs me more than copy/pasting some text from an article and getting:

    "Text that you copied"
    
    - From XYZ Times (httx://abc123.tld/path/to/article)

Apple Books does that nonsense as well and it drives me up a wall.

I'm sure there are browser extensions to tame but this thankfully there aren't many website that do this that I care to visit often.

> Then one time I noticed the URL was shortened and added a lot of tracking.

Ugh, yeah, this is really annoying as well. When a dedicated share button is my only option (like in a mobile app) I often open an incognito/private browsers window and paste it in so I can get redirected and then rip off all the tracking crap. Back when I used TikTok I had an iOS shortcut that I would "share" to which would rip off all the tracking for me. I always would feel gross when someone "anonymous" would share a TikTok or similar link and there would be a banner at the top of the page "Real Name shared this with you, follow them?".

[spockz]

It’s even weirder now. When you share a video through the button (which is the only way in the app) and another person opens the link while logged in you will now be linked in YouTube and you can share “directly” to the other’s YouTube. …

[theturtletalks]

Google Maps share button is filled with tracking too, now I just copy the address and send it.

I fear it’s all futile because even if we are privacy focused, if our friends and families are sharing links like this, Google knows how all of us are connected to each other in the real world.

[hogwasher]

You can copy a shared link and use the browser url bar to open it in a private window, or delete the extra crap at the end of the url (anything after the ? in a lot of cases).

Granted, that doesn't help for the service you're using to communicate with people (phone provider, real time chat service, email provider, whatever) and/or store your contacts. Especially if you're talking to someone who, say, hasn't turned all the creepy Gemini stuff off in their Google account and it's scanning all their emails and learning the names and emails of everyone they talk to.

Or any app that has location permission and can detect that you're in the same place as someone else.

I'd think they can probably figure it out by time too, after enough shared videos. Like, see that when x account opens a video, then y account also opens that same video within such-and-such an amount of time, or vice versa.

[dredmorbius]

There are tools which will strip tracking tags on copy. Firefox includes this, currently "Copy clean link" on the left-click context menu.

What are needed are tools which will discard any tracking automatically on receipt, whether that's email, messaging clients, operating systems (e.g., Android alternatives, iOS ... I have suspicions Android itself won't willingly implement this unless forced by lawsuit or regulation), and/or browsers. It would also be nice to see sharing / social sites and platforms drop this crap as well. The commercially-oriented, advertising-supported ones likely won't (willingly, as per Android above), but I could see Mastodon or other federated noncommercial systems adopting this approach and cleaning submitted links by default.