Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
Please accept this in the ethos of no stupid questions.
The only programming I do is to defy tracking by deleting hash lines after ? In the url.
Some popular sites I am embarrassed to admit to even viewing have found a way around this by offering me share links without the ?.
It’s Instagram I am ashamed to mention.
What do I do to get rid of the tracking now?
Okay… can you help me delete the tracking in this link?
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=W_svsNc6seE
Is the tracking piece after the second equals?
Query parameters follow everything after the
?and take the formata=foo&b=bar. Essentially, key value pairs using=and separated by&.There's no perfect way to know what is and isn't part of a tracking stuff. We just use our intuition. In this case, when we look at a YouTube video we see links like
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ. Notice thev=xxx? So, in the URL you shared, we can deduce thatv=W_svsNc6seEis needed and thesi=xxxis the tracking stuff. You should also then remove the&because it's no longer separating two entries. Leaving it doesn't seem to hurt anything though. Sohttps://music.youtube.com/watch?v=W_svsNc6seEwithout&si=22MYOxMc5wMcdatU.I don't know what
sistands for, but in my head I see it as "share ID". A lot of services usesior something similar for the tracking stuff.Thanks very much.
I shall experiment with your models and hopefully learn a little bit more about this.
Would you say that these platforms are trying to make it harder for dabblers like me to defeat some of their tracking?
Yeah. TikTok's generated share links don't have separate params for the content and tracking making it difficult to get around without copying the link into the browser yourself. Because it's mostly used through an app and not the browser, you cannot just copy the URL and you have to use the share button.