cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/8834978
No need to remove the URL tracking parameters manually. 🥳
I tried it and the link didn’t work. Anyone else have issues?
Yeah it only worked sometimes for me, it’ll probably get better with time
The people on Lemmy convinced me to switch from Chrome to Firefox.
Next step is switching from socks to knee socks.
And from butt plugs to tail plugs.
Oh wait, this comes later in the process.
What this has done for me has highlighted how many things are tracker me and how badly those things are designed because they don’t fail gracefully.
I had a telehealth visit link today that broke using this feature. So that’s nice to know. My virtual doctors appointments are being tracked by a third party.
Edit, looks like Firefox is smarter than me, ignore this.
I don’t know what the link was doing, but just because FF thought it was “tracking info” does not mean it was nefarious. It could be used for authentication or security. I have not tested it, but I presume this would break a “reset your password” email link.
I’m rather certain, the way it works is that it removes parameters that are named like well-known tracking parameters. For example, most webpages use Google Analytics, so you see UTM parameters everywhere.
A “reset your password” link could theoretically use a parameter that’s named
utm_content
, then it would presumably get removed by this feature, but I see no sane reason why one would name their password-reset parameter like that.
In general, such tracking parameters are usually named in a way that it will rarely clash with other parameters a webpage may want to use, so for example they may have a prefix likeutm_
.Oh, so it’s not just stripping the GET parameters? Okay, that’s smarter than I was assuming
Stripping all GET parameters would break many, many legitimate webpages. 🫠