just to add on to what folks have said, here’s a specific example:
You copy a YouTube link and send to a friend. The link ends with &sid=12345678
Youtube knows who you are and it knows who your friend is. When it creates the link it knows “Linktank created link 12345678”
When your friend opens the link, now YouTube knows “this person has some relation to Linktank.”
With this YouTube can find out who you know and what you share with each other, without you ever having to tell them directly. Whether that’s something you’re ok with is up to you.
You ever copy a link and it’s like 3 paragraphs long? Most likely, most of that link is has additional query string parameters that’s used for tracking. You could probably remove most of, if not everything after the ‘?’ in those URLs, and it will work fine, but remove all the tracking info.
Can someone explain the issue here? Genuinely, please educate me about this.
What are the queries and why don’t we like them?
just to add on to what folks have said, here’s a specific example:
You copy a YouTube link and send to a friend. The link ends with
&sid=12345678Youtube knows who you are and it knows who your friend is. When it creates the link it knows “Linktank created link 12345678”
When your friend opens the link, now YouTube knows “this person has some relation to Linktank.”
With this YouTube can find out who you know and what you share with each other, without you ever having to tell them directly. Whether that’s something you’re ok with is up to you.
If you browse the web and want to send a URL to a friend.
Make sure to delete the question mark and every single character after it.
Everything before is the real URL and will link to the same webpage.
Everything after are tracking numbers and other parameters that aren’t needed. They make the URL longer, but also allow tracking between devices.
There is one unfortunate exception to this rule, and that is “?v=…”
which, for some video platforms, is the actual reference ti which video it is supposed to play.
For YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ can actually be edited down to https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ
Not everything. Sometimes it is needed. So you have to experiment what is working
You ever copy a link and it’s like 3 paragraphs long? Most likely, most of that link is has additional query string parameters that’s used for tracking. You could probably remove most of, if not everything after the ‘?’ in those URLs, and it will work fine, but remove all the tracking info.
Link-tracking. (the next blog post can explain this 100x better than me)
Tracking, trying to link people together.