These URLs are artisanal. They are made only for you.

Other site's URLs can also be called "high entropy" URLs, for example, they may contain the time down to the millisecond, in one case.

When you share these URLs to the world wide web, you broadcast to this service (to YouTube, to Google, to TikTok, to Reddit etc.) that "Hey! This previously-anonymous account is actually me!". When you share this link to your friend halfway across the world who only talks to you on Discord, and they click it, you broadcast to this service that actually you two are buddies. Same here on Hexbear. This sharing helps these sites build a social graph on us.

The threat is two-fold. Google has a powerful search crawler, and also runs a massive ad network. They could sift through the pages they indexed on Hexbear and link the exact Hexbear account to your real name. People who have clicked on your shared link will also be exposed as having been on that exact page to which you shared the link. This kind of metadata leak can be dangerous, as law enforcement has previously asked Google to reveal people who watched so-and-so YouTube video at so-and-so time.

This bot also handles TikTok, Yandex, Snapchat, Meta/Facebook trackers that all have this same ad-related threat.

I will probably add functionality to sift through old comments that have dangerous trackers (like TikTok, which exposes your name and picture to anyone who clicks it) and remove/report them soon.

Be on the lookout for the high-entropy parameters when you share things on your phone as well. Parameters in the url that look like ?si=blahblah, ?igshid, which look like they'd stand for "share ID" or "Instagram share ID", as well as obfuscated TikTok links like vm.tiktok․com/blahblah will all track you and your social circle.

To avoid this, you may use Firefox Multi-Account Containers, and make Hexbear use its own container that you keep separate from everything else. Although this solution is not perfect, it will prevent one facet of your identity leaking and make it harder for other sites to correlate your digital footprint.

When someone clicks your TikTok link, a big banner on top of their screen shows your profile picture and your name. If you used your real name and picture... well. Uh-oh.

Other "light doxxing hazards" exist on other sites. After looking through Hexbear comments using the search function, you can find comments that link to *****, comments that link to ****, etc. that may include the user's general location down to the city, their preferred language, their screen width and height (in the URL!!! for some reason???), and some very high-entropy parameters that look like a long string of gibberish.

If I sat down today and looking to dox someone by looking at their profile and they shared links willy-nilly, I'd have some pretty good leads.