this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
975 points (99.1% liked)

Technology

58303 readers
10 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/8834978

No need to remove the URL tracking parameters manually. 🥳

Firefox copy link without site tracking

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Edit, looks like Firefox is smarter than me, ignore this.

I don’t know what the link was doing, but just because FF thought it was “tracking info” does not mean it was nefarious. It could be used for authentication or security. I have not tested it, but I presume this would break a “reset your password” email link.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

So click the regular copy button instead?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm rather certain, the way it works is that it removes parameters that are named like well-known tracking parameters. For example, most webpages use Google Analytics, so you see UTM parameters everywhere.

A "reset your password" link could theoretically use a parameter that's named utm_content, then it would presumably get removed by this feature, but I see no sane reason why one would name their password-reset parameter like that.
In general, such tracking parameters are usually named in a way that it will rarely clash with other parameters a webpage may want to use, so for example they may have a prefix like utm_.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh, so it's not just stripping the GET parameters? Okay, that's smarter than I was assuming

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Stripping all GET parameters would break many, many legitimate webpages. 🫠

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Looking at some comments on the linked post, I think you are right, and it would probably be fine for things like a password reset. I could play around with it, but my laptop is in the other room.