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Comment by ilrwbwrkhv | Hacker News Reader

In Firefox you can right click and choose to copy links without tracking. Another reason why every hacker should switch to Firefox.

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Right, but nothing prevents YouTube to get rid of public video IDs and simply share an opaque version of (user, video) whenever possible.

It'd be awful, but Google nowadays is willing to do shitty stuff like this and atrocious stuff like engage with the military too (because obviously the only flaw of project maven was being discovered)

> Right, but nothing prevents YouTube to get rid of public video IDs and simply share an opaque version of (user, video) whenever possible.

Instagram and TikTok have already been doing this for years.

If it's any consolation, Spotify has kept the old system.

Reddit has started to as well. Their app generates /s/ links which annoyingly require you to be logged in to resolve.

Another pattern that I hate is that Reddit will create an account for you if you are using a browser profile that does not have an associated Reddit account. It will then prompt you to 'personalise' the username and password.

I wonder if that factors into the # of accounts for their planned IPO. Does this also include new prive browsing sessions?

It's not just a tracking tag on Reddit; the shared links largely obfuscate the thread or comment, requiring one to go through the tracking link to find out what is behind it. An example for anyone curious:

Tracking /s/ link:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Blind/s/xxQGmFcPSS

Leads to the following:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Blind/comments/17atlg7/my_6_week_ol...

They might start giving us personalized hash URLs in the future, that would be akin to MIC (yellow tracking dots) on printers

I just tested this. "Copy without site tracking" does not strip the si= parameter (Firefox 120.0.1).

Yeah the "Copy without site tracking" isn't very good right now. I'm still using the ClearURLs extension to remove the tracking junk.

Ironically I've only seen it work best when removing tracking from Firefox's own links. https://mastodon.social/@lazycouchpotato/111480927753796790

It would be if it worked and were hackable, otherwise hackers should use extensions in any browser

Brave does this by default.

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