cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/31187638

Earlier today I came across a Reddit comment with a link to an Instagram post. The link had ?igsh= at the end.

When I clicked on the link, I got this popup. It had a name and profile photo that was different from that of the post being shared.

Join Firstname Lastname on Instagram

See photos, videos, and more from Firstname Lastname.

[ Open Instagram ]

not now

I avoid link trackers. However, I did not realize it was this bad.

To my knowledge, TikTok does the same thing and lists the name of the person that shared the link. Assuming this increases engagement, any website could enable such a feature, even on old links that you shared in the past.

You should manually remove any trackers before sharing, or use an app for it.

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    I tend to manually strip out anything random hash-looking from URLs. Not so much because I’m worried about identity being exposed, but because it just encourages data-mining and figuring out what causes people to post links places.

    There’s some open-source app I recall on Android in F-Droid that will do this for a set of known sites, “Link Cleaner” or something.

    kagis

    “Leon – URL Cleaner”. I assume that this is an allusion to the movie.

    https://github.com/svenjacobs/leon

    I also strip off the extension that the Wikipedia app adds to indicate that Wikipedia links are from the app.

    I also strip off “m.” leading URLs, like “m.wikipedia.org”, since that, by convention, forces desktop users to see a mobile version of a site, which is not normally what they want, whereas a non-.m link will still show the mobile site to mobile users.