YSK: Social media platforms attach trackers to the end of share URLs (which you can and should delete)
YSK: Social media platforms attach trackers to the end of share URLs (which you can and should delete)
Why YSK: Trackers don't do good for anyone except the platform, and they're not necessary to view the content in the URL.
It's courteous to not subject the recipient (most likely your friends and family) to this tracking. You're already sending them to the platform, which is tracking them in other ways. But you can help reduce that tracking by removing everything after the ampersand in the URL. Here are some examples.
Twitter example
URL: https://x.com/CookieSlayers/status/1623712884902567937?s=20
The s=20 is a Twitter-specific parameter to show that the tweet was copied from the web app. s=46 is iOS, and I can't remember what Android's code is. This is a relatively clean link, but there are some links that'll concatenate unique identifiers, like: https://x.com/CookieSlayers/status/1623712884902567937?s=20&t=Fn47fnSDJUD74bd9.
In this case, you'll notice there's also a &t= parameter, which is a unique identifier to the person who shared it.
The only part of the URL you need is https://x.com/CookieSlayers/status/1623712884902567937.
Instagram example:
URL: https://www.instagram.com/reel/CzP877du2EB/?igshid=MzRlODCFWFlZA==
The only part of the URL you need is https://www.instagram.com/reel/CzP877du2EB.
TikTok example
You'll notice TikTok's is a lot more readable in terms of what the URL contains.
The is_from_webapp parameter is self-explanatory, as is the sender_device, and then there's the identifier that's unique to you. In this case, 7302915057791436331.
The only part of the URL you need is https://www.tiktok.com/@inthepaintcrew/video/7301348328602717482.
The best route1 would be to use privacy-respecting frontends, but if you don't, simply deleting everything after the ampersand goes a long way.
1The best route would actually be to not use/reward platforms that are literally destroying humanity, but we're not there yet, so... in the meantime, let's just try to decrease the tracking and stop subjecting our friends and family to it as much as possible.
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What if you modify the tracker, like change some letters? Could that mess up their system if many did it?
I like the way you think
"In computer science, garbage in, garbage out (GIGO) is the concept that flawed, or nonsense (garbage) input data produces nonsense output"
If you go that route, start collecting real ids of loads of random people and then randomly add those. If you add invalid ones, they'll just get ignored, but with real random ones it really will fuck with their systems
A few years ago, I came across a tool that did exactly this. It might've been a browser extension... When you clicked a link that had trackers, rather than providing a clean URL, it sent incorrect/invalid parameters to the tracking link.