gotta chop off the pp
Privacy
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
Wasn’t their a Firefox plugin that did this? I recall a while ago to help do the same with Amazon but I never installed it and I don’t remember what it was called…
Firefox has "copy link without site tracking" built in now
Doesn't work for &pp=
yet, though. At least, it doesn't on ESR (and, by extension, Tor Browser and Mullvad Browser).
I think the extension you're talking about is ClearURL.
It encodes the contents of the search bar.
E.g. for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw&pp=ygUTZmlyc3QgeW91dHViZSB2aWRlbw%3D%3D
ygUTZmlyc3QgeW91dHViZSB2aWRlbw==
is first youtube video
in base64, which is what I typed into the search bar to find that video.
Not sure if that's actually useful for tracking or if there's another technical reason for it, but at the very least it could accidentally expose your search terms to others if you end up sharing links like that.
that's interesting. do you perhaps also know what the si param contains?
No, I don't know. If I had to guess, si
might be short for something like "source identifier" and just contain some unique identifier to track who originally shared a link that others are using.
Oh, that's how you get it. I just tried it and got the regular si link which doesn't seem to have valid b64 data.
Lmfao, this community has automatically removed the si= suffix in my second link. But it didn't remove the pp= suffix....
Edit: Fixed, finally. It kept trying to convert my links all over the place. They're not meant to be links, just a clear description of the syntax.
Since a long time, out of respect for others, I only share YT videos like this: youtube,com/embed/[video_ID]
respect for others
But also yourself. Like this you won't get grouped by Google with other people online.
I know, that is the idea
https://openuserjs.org/scripts/Kraust/Youtube_Embed_Redirect
Little script with few bytes, I installed it as extension. It redirect embedded when I click on a YT link or open a video in a new tab. It0s more confortable as edit the URL by hand, the script don't do other than this. Apart you can watch it in full tab size, better quality and without ads. You can search the Video also with Andi and watch it there embedded and sandboxed in the search result.
Thanks for shedding light on this. I've also noticed the same thing on Instagram links. They now have a "igsh=" added to track sharing.
What about that youtu.be one
So long as there's no extra suffix after, it shouldn't be so bad. So if you have youtu.be/?v=[video_ID]
it's fine, but if there's a &si=
or &pp=
or &anything=
, then that's most likely tracking and should be removed.
?
is the start of the suffixes, &
denotes a change in suffix. Every video has a v=
suffix to denote the video itself, but everything else isn't needed.
? is the start of the suffixes, & denotes a change in suffix Technically speaking they are query parameters not suffixes.
Can't they be both? Potato potahto.
Thank you for the correct terminology though.