Posting links and possibly sharing personal info without realizing it [View all]

[Silent3]

Last edited Mon Jun 22, 2020, 03:52 PM - Edit history (1)

I was just looking at someone else's post here on DU - with a link to a great Borowitz Report. The link looked basically like this (I've mangled it a little on purpose):

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/susan-collins-puts-bolton-book-in-amazon-cart-but-remains-undecided-about-placing-order?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Borowitz_099920&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&bxid=5be222272ddf9c72dc6f2afa&cndid=20005454&hasha=e450e5d7ac6499999ff0a62d476541d4&hashb=72674cc0a7777728254ac53aee01b7c589ad3608&hashc=27040888888829c2bfefcb5e4160a5e4637f89910617754ae6a8f4446e232ce&esrc=newsletters-form-sig&utm_term=TNY_Borowitz

But all you need to share this article with everyone else is this:

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/susan-collins-puts-bolton-book-in-amazon-cart-but-remains-undecided-about-placing-order

What's all of the rest of that crap? It's a lot of tracking info, info that lets God-knows-who discover all kinds of stuff, including things like who decided to share this link, and where that person originally found out about the linked article (from Facebook, from Twitter, from a particular friend, etc). While most of this info is in pretty cryptic, some of it is easier to guess at, like that somewhere along the line this link arrived via a newsletter.

None of that tracking info is needed, however, if all you really want to do is share the article and nothing else.

Since I'm a software engineer, fixing this sort of thing comes naturally to me. For others, it might not be so obvious.

A good rule of thumb: Look for the first "?" in the link. Most of the time you can throw away everything starting from that question mark onward.

To make sure this works, paste your full link, copy just the first part of the link up to (but not including) the question mark, then paste the fragment you just copied into another browser tab or window. If that works, and takes you to the article you wanted to share with everyone, it's safe to delete the tracking crap before you post.

Update for Youtube videos:

I was just sharing a link for the Asimov-based Foundation series that's going to be on Apple Plus (which looks like it could be amazing!):

https : // www.youtube .com/watch?v=xgbPSA94Rqg (ignore the spaces, I had to add them so you could see the link).

In this case, you do need something that comes after the first "?". You need the "v=whatever" part too, all the way up to the first ampersand "&" that follows, or else Youtube won't know which particular video to play.