Reddit, YouTube, facebook and all of the other social media websites track the urls I copied. Whenever you copy a link, check out, it is not the actual url and/or it contains a track id in the url. I can’t share anything with the people any more, and click their links, because I hate being tracked.
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Everyone on Android are now sharing fucking « share. google » bullshit. I hate it
Fucking Enshitification at work and fucking complicit government
Or the more direct
Delete everything after the ‘?’ in the url before sharing it, and you should be good to go.
Removing all query parameters is not the solution. They can be used for tracking, but not necessarily.
If you have a better solution, I’m sure we’d all appreciate it. :)
Reddit now copies without the ‘?’ but the copied url has tracking in it. Because when I open the url in browser, the page opens and then I see the tracking id. Before that, it is a simple url, with encrypted data
Stop using reddit
Social media sites live as advertising vehicles. Being able to show numbers related to users showing links helps them sell advertisements.
It’s reportedly why Bluesky redirects links in the app to a referrer – so websites can see how much traffic they get from there and have a reason to post on the network.
Whether or not this is a good thing, and how much tracking is acceptable, is an entirely separate discussion. (Which should really include words like “I regularly donate to my Lemmy instance” or their equivalent…)
On Android, I highly recommend and regularly use Léon - The URL Cleaner. It’s about as plain and simple of an app there is, just Register Léon as browser (this makes the URL Cleaner app available when you share a link), and set the Action after clean to whatever you like (I set it to Copy to clipboard, then paste the cleaned link from clipboard wherever I’m looking to actually share).
Sure it takes a few seconds longer to share a cleaned up link, but it does exactly what it’s supposed to do and strips all that tracking shit off the links you wanna share.
For a bit more control check out the alternatives list too. URLCheck is awesome
