Friends and family don't know what cleaning a URL means. Nobody does.

Thankfully uBlock Origin removes those parameters for us. The default filters include a whole bunch of removeparam filters; e.g. privacy.txt See also removeparam.

Maybe you could help your friends and family install Firefox and/or uBlock Origin? Every little bit helps :)

To be honest 99% of people, certainly including me, probably don't recognize tracking elements in a URL unless they're like affiliate links.

Phones and chrome are designed to prevent people from noticing that they're being tracked and helping big tech track others

It's not just safer, they're nicer to look at too. I hate seeing a 20 character URL followed by a ? and 200 characters.

Edit: product links are a major offender here.

Agreed. Recently youtube started adding tracking parameters (?si=) to their share links. I always clean them up.

Indeed. I use Léon on Android, very straightforward, open source, and easy to install and configure...

https://github.com/svenjacobs/leon

This would be a good feature add to Lemmy. Clean pre-post.

Yeah I always mention it when people send a link with all the extra stuff, how you can usually delete everything past the question mark

People barely know what a browser is, you cant expect them to know what an url is, let alone what clearing it is

If you get them to install ClearUrls in their browser (Firefox, not Firefox), they can copy/paste URLs directly from their URL bar and the URL will be clean with no extra effort.

I keep it enabled in all my browser profiles pretty much always

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/master/LegitimateURLShortener.txt

Add that to people you know Ublock lists

I wish websites would clean their URLs

Interesting, I never really thought about this before. I wonder if there’s a clipboard manager that does this automatically?

I thought I was alone in my windmill-tilting on this one! Nice to see there are others who clean URLs of unnecessary querystring parameters

The OCD part of me really wants to clean up those URLs simply because the link becomes a massive novella of garbage that's harder to read than Yu-Gi-Oh card text.

I try to do it. Mainly i see a lot of ?utm_source shit and kill it.

I do this because I hate super long URL's, but is this actually a problem for privacy? Does it not actually fuck with the tracking because now two separate people have got the same tracking Params? (Genuine question).

On Android, LinkSheet supports cleaning URLs. It's an awesome tool in general.

Filter cleaner should be built into the browser.

I always remove anything after /ref= from an Amazon link before I forward it to my wife (she has the account and does the orders).