New Firefox privacy feature strips URLs of tracking parameters | Hacker News Reader

New Firefox privacy feature strips URLs of tracking parameters

bleepingcomputer.com

43 pointsmikece6 comments

For people who want this feature but do not want to turn on internal flags, or are using a different browser, there's an extension that does this job.

ClearURLs Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/clearurls/

ClearURLs Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clearurls/lckanjgm...

The Firefox extension is also marked as a recommended extension, so presumably has gone through some policy scrutiny, if Mozilla docs are anything to go by: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-on-badges

If people are already using uBlock Origin, you can use https://github.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/blob/master/Legiti... and it works really good.

The article said, with this feature enabled, Firefox removes query parameter "fbclid" even on example.com domain.

So if you happened to use the same query parameter the popular web sites are using for the tracking, you will have a problem.

Also, web sites can counter react by changing the name of query parameter, or just generate random names and treats unknown query parameter as a tracking parameter.

I don't understand the kind of people who, on the one hand, hate tracking parameter so much want to let browser remove it, but on the other hand, still continues to use such a web service. Just don't use such a web service. I don't.

Because it sadly has become so normalized that almost any site tracks you to the best ability of the website creator. If people had done that from the beginning like it was heavily recommended we certainly would have less dragnet tracking.

Hats off, this is a fantastic feature to include in the browser. If Mozilla can pull this off, I can _almost_ forgive Colorways. Almost.

Stripping trackers manually has been second nature to me for years, but installing an extension to automate this process always seemed like overkill... makes a lot of sense for the browser to do this on its own.

I wish everything did this, including utm_ parameters when sharing/copying links. They're so long and ugly otherwise!

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