I caught one that had a time link in it a couple days ago. IF I WANT A TIME LINK I WILL DO IT MYSELF. I will be more careful on all YouTube copy/pastes from now on, good call
repping firefox nation and sharing some addons i have for nasty trackers!
*i use the clear urls addon if my other addons couldnt scrape everything off. to use it click on the orange trashcan icon and then the blue tools icon. that will take you to the tool where you can paste your dirty url(s) :]
I habitually do this with links from anywhere - strip everything from the ? onwards. Don't recall it ever causing problems with any site. In fact with some sites it seems to prevent problems.
I wouldn't call it "corporate surveillance" really more just sudden pushy analytics for advertisers. Lots of sites use SIs for this purpose. Either way, cross-site tracking like this is always stinky and Google hates you
That's an absolute lie. Stop spreading misinformation. It's query string that tells google information about where the link came from and maybe who shared it. Google has no way of knowing you're "connected" to who shared it. All it will know is you clicked a link what that ID in it.
I think it’s just a misunderstanding of how URL params work. It’s likely that the string contains information on which YT account created the share link so anyone who clicks the link could have their YT account associated with the source account, which can be used for eg video recommendations.
They can’t use it to identify your socials on other other platforms, but they could create unwanted connections between your YT account and others, which still isn’t great.
There is no documentation as far as I can find. But recommendation is central to YT, so it wouldn’t be a reach to speculate that by knowing that Alice clicked on Bob’s link, YT might use that information to recommend other videos Bob watches to Alice.
Every single confirmed connection helps build out a giant web that Google has on you, me, and...basically everyone tbh
Click a link with an SI? You might be associated with this person, so you might share interests with them, and they like this thing, so you might like it too, so run and ad for it!
Yes it sounds complicated but this happened to me EXACTLY. I watched a video that a friend sent me (with an SI), and I proceeded to get ads about their interests. God I hate advertising now
I assumed it was something nefarious like this since I saw these extended links appearing months back, and have always erased them before sending. Good to see what's really going on with it.
The ? indicates that the URL is stopping and what follows is a list of helpful information for the website to consume to adjust behavior. The values come in key/value pairs, separated by &
I've been deleting that ever since I noticed it happening, and they're not the only ones that do it either. Twitter also added them a while ago and I know Amazon has it buried in their links
I thought this was why I'd seen the change in the URLs; I'll make sure I 'strip' Youtube links before I post them here if I remember how by heart and if I can't I'll refer to the posted instructions. Thank you very kindly, Poes!
I always clean those URLs up, not specifically to block tracing, just because sanitised versions are shorter, but you are right, the tracing is an issue.
Comments
*i use the clear urls addon if my other addons couldnt scrape everything off. to use it click on the orange trashcan icon and then the blue tools icon. that will take you to the tool where you can paste your dirty url(s) :]
On FB I often explain to people they don't need anything after the ?.
Click a link with an SI? You might be associated with this person, so you might share interests with them, and they like this thing, so you might like it too, so run and ad for it!
Thanks for sharing~
Doesn't have all that extra stuff on it. Think my adblock is removing that stuff automatically.
https://example.com?key=value&key2=value2
They kept the ? in the second example so that the time code (t) still works
I hate it here.
The has got to stop. This has gone beyond way too far ages ago.
I think it's realy the time to use an other plateform.