Guide | How To Protect your privacy! Posting Clean URL without Tracking Tokens

[Ink]

Good to Know: When copying links from your social feeds, remember to remove unwanted UTM Tags and Tracking parameters.

Key Benefits:

• a cleaner, spam-free URL for readers of the post
• removes the UTM tags and any trackers

Your social feeds often include unwanted parameters, that when posted elsewhere link back to where it was originally posted. Most of these parameters indicate where you, as the user clicked them from. A good tip is to clean these URLs before posting publicly. See the example below.

An ugly, cluttered URL:

http://lifehacker.com/5804911/the-best-music-player-application-for-windows?utm_campaign=xxx_lifehacker_facebook&utm_source=lifehacker_facebook&utm_medium=xxx

What information can be gathered?
The source of the URL was posted on LifeHacker's Facebook page, also may imply the user either visits or has a Facebook account.

So what can be removed? Everything after the direct link to the article.

?utm_campaign=xxxx_lifehacker_facebook&utm_source=lifehacker_facebook&utm_medium=xxxx

Will I still be visiting the same website/page? Simple answer, yes.
A clean, spam-free and direct URL:

http://lifehacker.com/5804911/the-best-music-player-application-for-windows

Try and test this yourself.

 

[DoxThis]

This is nice but I dont have the time to do this everytime I goto a link :/
Ill stick to my vpn

 

[jamescv7]

As I brought interested on that link trick then I've noticed where you can do that too on search engines like Google; for some people want to be quicker but little complicated .

The first one which retrieve from Google Search with unique alphanumeric characters to obtain a direct site to Lifehacker.

http://www.google.com.ph/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CBwQFjAAahUKEwjAndHlrIbGAhWDMLwKHT7zAA0&url=http%3A%2F%2Flifehacker.com%2F5804911%2Fthe-best-music-player-application-for-windows&ei=odF4VYDJFYPh8AW-5oNo&usg=AFQjCNE63MBy81S5-211d-uDneY0IFWs_w&bvm=bv.95277229,d.dGY

Remove all the characters except lifehacker.com(slash)5804911(slash)the-best-music-player-application-application-for-windows

The character %2F or any in related code are considered as slash

lifehacker.com/5804911/the-best-music-player-application-for-windows

 

[comfortablynumb15]

It doesn't take any time, Dox, lol. You literally highlight the offending text, hit the delete key and off you go. This is also sometimes good for getting rid of annoying redirects embedded in URLs. Right click the link, "Copy link location", paste it in the browser and you can see the junk in there most times.

 

[Ink]

Bump.

Internet users may have two issues with these tracking tokens. They first increase the size of the web address significantly, often by more than double the stripped down size. If you want to post the link on a social networking site for instance, you may prefer to display a cleaner link, especially since some users may be deterred by the tracking added to the url.

How To Remove UTM_ Tracking Tokens In Your Browser - gHacks Tech News

Extension for Firefox: au-revoir-utm

Extensions for Chrome: Tracking Token Stripper

Before:

After:

@frogboy (Used your thread as an example)