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Comment by anandnair | Hacker News Reader

I don't think there is a foolproof way to tackle this.

If companies try to hash the direct and referral link into a single link (or use a redirect link). Apple could visit the site internally, return the actual, tracking-free webpage, and forward that to the user. This would mean the referral link is actually just tracking how many times Apple decodes it and would devalue the use of a referral link since it would just be reporting "how many times this link was forwarded" and not "how many times this link was clicked"

Yup. Same way Gmail neutered tracking pixels in emails back in the day. They open each one as soon as the email is received, rather than when the recipient opens it.

Why do the people even want the internet anyways, they like getting everything from apple

That is a MUCH larger investment than shipping some client side code though.

Yeah this is a very naive and somewhat potentially harmful measure. Think of all the old .asp and .php websites that basically route you to a page by just throwing a big old fat query string into the URL.

The way this can be bypassed is:

Before: mylink.mydomain?tracking_id=abc123 After: mylink.mydomain/home/abc123/

Yeah, it might wreck SEO. But if you're really trying to track users and see who clicked on your email or whatever, it's probably the case that you don't care about SEO in this specific case.

It doesn't blanket-remove query parameters

There is some kind of blanket-remove bug with bookmarks. Try bookmarking a URL with query parameters in Safari on iOS. I don't know if it happens with every URL, but with this one[1] specifically, it drops the query parameter from the bookmark. You have to go add it in manually by editing the bookmark afterwards. I wonder if it's motivated by the same kind of change as this article is about, or if it's a separate bug. (I haven't tested this recently, but it was true as of late last year.)

[1] https://www.twintown.com/collections/acoustic-guitars?sort_b...

That's likely due to the page having a canonical URL meta tag:

  <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.twintown.com/collections/acoustic-guitars"/>

I mean presumably they have some decent heuristic for what are "user-identifiable" parameters.

But I don't trust that heuristics works for every query parameter for every website on the internet.

Here's one: Imagine you run a small website and send signup confirmation emails. Suddenly, 20-30% of your users can no longer complete signups and you have no idea why. Oh yeah, our URL is:

mysite.foo/signup?uid=139191238123.

And apple filtered out the uid parameter.

This is exactly what I am afraid of, we use url query parameters heavily to prefill forms for our employees and clients, think online training and service agreements. This will break a lot of our operation.

"This will break a lot of our operation"

》 For safari users 》 Until apple own the internet so the site is forced to adapt.

It breaks the web. There are literally no real rules on how you use them, so you have a lot of things that will be confused with tracking (gclid,clickid,campaign, etc). Even stuff that was originally tracking gets re-used. I've worked on systems where utm_medium=web and utm_keyword=socks were used to literally query the landing page for the user and effectively were the U in URL.

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