[HN Gopher] What does "Copy clean link" mean?
___________________________________________________________________
What does "Copy clean link" mean?
Author : gregors
Score : 258 points
Date : 2023-03-09 18:30 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (support.brave.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (support.brave.com)
| m463 wrote:
| Why wouldn't businesses just switch to unique links?
|
| In other words, like switching an amazon link from:
| https://www.amazon.com/dp/<product-id>
|
| to a shortened tracking url like:
| https://amzn.to/<unique-id>
| rovr138 wrote:
| I feel someone did something like this.
|
| Maybe facebook? Probably facebook...
|
| _Edit_
|
| It was facebook, https://tidbits.com/2022/07/19/facebook-
| change-ensures-track...
|
| There's a discussion here,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32129100
| haburka wrote:
| BRB going to change all my tracking query strings to get around
| this. don't be mad at me my OKR is getting tracking to work 2%
| better.
| tshaddox wrote:
| You should add an extra query param containing a MAC that is
| required to be present and correct for the URL to load. Just
| kill the normal idea of web URLs altogether.
| indymike wrote:
| I love the idea of reducing extra paramspam on urls... but this
| is easily defeated with a redirect. I.e. somedomain.com/<uid
| here>
| suddenclarity wrote:
| Isn't this more of a convince when sharing a link than removing
| the tracking from your own sessions? It kinda assumes that
| you're already at the final destination when copying so no
| redirect will be of any use. Or I'm just misunderstanding the
| purpose.
| pphysch wrote:
| How does Brave determine what is a necessary query parameter and
| what is not?
| poisonborz wrote:
| Speculation: they have a list of popular sites & tracking tags
| paulsmith wrote:
| I've always thought those ?v= after YouTube links and ?id=
| after HN articles looked sus ...
| dymk wrote:
| It's how YouTube tracks what videos I watch and how HN
| tracks what comments I've read! Dastardly clever of them...
| lmkg wrote:
| Indeed, a few clicks from the article arrives at the specific
| list:
|
| https://github.com/brave/brave-
| core/blob/master/browser/net/...
| zamnos wrote:
| even just manually putting fbclid on the list would go a long
| way to assuaging the paranoid
| joe5150 wrote:
| Their filters are open source.
|
| https://github.com/brave/brave-core/blob/master/browser/net/...
| pphysch wrote:
| Thanks! Seems unlikely to hit any false positives.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Also trivial to bypass if a developer could care less.
| sphars wrote:
| For Android, I've been using URLCheck[0] for opening any link
| system wide, to clean the URL and check for redirects and open in
| specific browser. Just have to set it as your default browser
|
| [0]: https://github.com/TrianguloY/UrlChecker
| legrande wrote:
| Been using CleanLinks[0] on Firefox for a while now. Nice to know
| I have the same feature in Brave now. Sometimes I manually remove
| query params from URLs when sharing them. I really need to
| automate that though!
|
| [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clean-
| links-w...
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Have you tried CleanURLs? It's a recommended extension, and has
| 120K users compared to the 154 of Cleanlinks.
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clearurls/
| techwizrd wrote:
| For those looking for similar functionality in Firefox, Chrome,
| and Edge, I've been using ClearURLs[0] for several years in
| Firefox and Firefox on Android. It works well.
|
| 0: https://github.com/ClearURLs/Addon
| LorenDB wrote:
| You beat me to it :)
| atdt wrote:
| Reviews on the Chrome Web Store mention that the extension can
| break Google OAuth login flow and Amazon checkout. Did you
| encounter that at all?
| lamontcg wrote:
| I don't use Google OAuth much but it works for when I need to
| enter YTTV credentials. It has never broken Amazon checkout
| for me, smells like FUD.
| joe5150 wrote:
| For what it's worth I use the FF version and I've never had
| this problem as far as I can tell.
| techwizrd wrote:
| I also use the FF version and have not encountered this
| problem (to my knowledge).
| BeefySwain wrote:
| I used to use this and it did indeed break Amazon checkout.
| Took me forever to figure out!
| ptaken wrote:
| It does break youtrack quite severely and it took me forever
| to single out this extension. Afaict there's also no way to
| filter URLs so I had to get rid of it on my work browser :/
| jonas-w wrote:
| Not OP, and YMMV, but i never had problems with google,
| amazon or any other website. ClearURLs is one of those
| extensions you install, after you open your browser for the
| first time and completely forget about it, because it just
| works (TM). As a matter of fact, I had to make sure that it
| was even installed, before commenting.
| jjordan wrote:
| Just be careful with this kind of plugin. Had something similar
| installed a few years ago that was breaking some Google links
| and I had no idea why until I realized I had this kind of
| plugin installed.
| morjom wrote:
| uBlock Origin works well enough for me with some basic lists.
| Recommended reading for firefox users:
|
| https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions#-don...
| kayson wrote:
| What lists are you using for queryparams?
| skrowl wrote:
| In the default lists, under privacy, just subscribe to
| "AdGuard URL Tracking Protection" and it'll do the same
| thing for you
| kayson wrote:
| Thanks!
| bhartzer wrote:
| When copying or sharing a link, I usually manually strip out
| everything after the ? in the URL.
|
| I've been doing this manually for several years now.
|
| Is it possible to create a bookmarklet that does the same thing
| (i.e., via JavaSript)?
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| I have an app I use to monitor my clipboard and rewrite certain
| URLs if sees, placing the clean version back in the clipboard
| (being sure not to end up in an infinite loop).
| LukeLambert wrote:
| javascript:prompt('URL',window.location.origin+window.location.
| pathname)
|
| Edit: But be aware that some sites (like this one) use the
| parameters in the query string.
| gesman wrote:
| Does it follow redirects and removes affiliate links?
| enw wrote:
| Why is capitalization inconsistent?
|
| Some use sentence case, some title case.
| timvisee wrote:
| This is the same browser that did the opposite before: injecting
| their own referral parameter in links.
| colordrops wrote:
| How long ago was this? Is it still the case? And why the flood
| of comments like this in every Brave thread, but never on
| Chrome threads? Chrome is purely and unapologetically a portal
| specifically for supporting an ad network, yet I never see the
| same sort of comments. At least Brave is upfront about what
| they are doing.
| judge2020 wrote:
| TLDR: if you typed in binance.us, it autocompleted the
| 'suggested site' Binance US, which included a referral link
| that netted Brave (or maybe Eich themselves) some sum of
| money (not sure how much it was then, but right now it's $100
| USDT when your referral deposits $50).
|
| The argument is that Brave should be considered referring
| users if you get to Binance (or other sites) via the
| Omnibox.. but it's disingenuous when it was suggested by the
| query "Binance", since the user already had the intention to
| visit and likely sign up for Binance. It would've been more
| acceptable if the omnibox only injected the referral code if
| you clicked 'Binance' when you tried to search "crypto
| exchange".
|
| https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1269289242905042944
|
| https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1269423583480082432
| yucky wrote:
| Because these are astroturfed responses attacking Brave. You
| see it on here anytime the browser is mentioned. Meanwhile,
| it's the best browser available by a mile which explains
| their attacks.
| suprjami wrote:
| Got an impartial source for "best"?
|
| https://privacytests.org/ is created by a Brave employee,
| so that doesn't count
| GeorgeWBasic wrote:
| You're asking someone for a source for their opinion,
| instead of understanding what an opinion is?
| judge2020 wrote:
| "which explains their attacks" implies "they only attack
| brave because they know it's objectively better than
| other browsers".
| crummy wrote:
| people are paying hacker news commenters to post this
| stuff?
| dheera wrote:
| > without interfering with coarse-grained campaign-level
| tracking
|
| I often manually scrub campaign-level stuff when sending links
| to friends just to have nicer, shorter URLs
| dormento wrote:
| To be fair, seemed to be by mistake and quickly corrected. They
| also issued an apoogy.
|
| (disclamer: I still use Firefox and recomend you do so as
| well).
| rovr138 wrote:
| That's a really intentional mistake to make.
|
| Another Firefox user
| colordrops wrote:
| Firefox does all kinds of shady tracking too unfortunately.
| Really the best option is to use forks of chrome or Firefox
| if you are concerned with privacy.
| harry8 wrote:
| [citation needed]
| dahdum wrote:
| The mistake was getting caught? Eich's initial response was
| that was intentional and ethical. Until it went viral and his
| view evolved. Granted, I'm not too keen to give him or Brave
| much benefit of doubt.
|
| https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1269289242905042944
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| If we're buying in that "by mistake" nonsense we're being so
| incredibly naive. How can someone even programatically inject
| referral links in your page "by mistake"?
|
| I've seen too many instances like Google Chrome still
| tracking you in incognito where companies just come back with
| they were doing it "by mistake" to believe any of them were
| really saying the truth.
| Arainach wrote:
| >Google Chrome still tracking you in incognito
|
| When was this?
| darig wrote:
| [dead]
| unxdfa wrote:
| Eich doesn't seem like the sort of person who makes mistakes,
| preferring to do a PR backtrack after misjudging his audience
| after comparing them to his own dubious standards. Never the
| sort who thinks they did something wrong but likes you to
| think they did.
| [deleted]
| nicce wrote:
| Sadly, that is a standard procedure for many current
| businesses. Do things until you get caught, then say it was a
| mistake and apogolize.
|
| Of course there are real mistakes, but this one was quite
| difficult to make...
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| I use a python script for this and I constantly have to tweak it
| to understand more urls. It's not just stripping out tracking
| parameters. There are also redirects to bypass, real urls encoded
| in the parameters of the tracked url, and all that. There are
| some formats which I haven't figured out, like many of the ones
| used in emailed links. I figure that once it converges I'll
| rewrite it in Javascript as a browser extension, but even after a
| year or two of usage and tweaking, it still misses a lot and
| doesn't seem robust.
| heyoni wrote:
| Give us the gist!
| smsm42 wrote:
| Awesome, I was this close to making an extension for myself to do
| it, it's so tiring to cut out the refspam every time you copy a
| link.
| superkuh wrote:
| The most amazing thing about this link is that the cloudflare
| page it shows me before the actual page actually sends me to the
| real page instead of just sitting and spinning forever no matter
| how many captcha or whatever I do.
|
| I suppose Brave went out of there way to tweak the cloudflare
| options to allow cross browser compatibility. I didn't know this
| was possible at all. I guess all the other sites on the web just
| don't care.
| harry8 wrote:
| cloudflare is a real worry, huh? Not talked about much but
| their power is quite a bit larger than a de-centralised web
| should tolerate.
| rafaelturk wrote:
| This is great.. Amazing how simple, yeat I've never thought about
| this
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| This is nice, but I wish it would also remove the google tracking
| wrapper on URLs in g-suite.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I wish I could open a link from Messages this way. You can copy
| the link, but doing so triggers a "preview", which loads the link
| in an inset window.
| rozab wrote:
| https://github.com/ClearURLs/Addon
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| By way of idle curiosity: the Amazon example on the CleanURLs
| homepage and in the repo README calls __mk_de_DE=AMAZON a
| tracking parameter. Is it? Or is it a variation of the
| _utf8=[U+2603 SNOWMAN] technique to force ancient IE to use a
| reasonable POST encoding[1]?
|
| [1] https://stackoverflow.com/q/3222013
| racl101 wrote:
| Nice! Very nice!
| filipmares wrote:
| Why not make this the default calling it "Copy Link" and offer a
| second option "Copy Link With Potential Tracking!!!"?
| netsharc wrote:
| Huh, let's not do that. If I chose "Copy link", I'd expect an
| exact copy of the string, not a modified (cleaned) one. What
| next, an image editor where "Copy image" gives you an enhanced
| image where e.g. people in the background and imperfections on
| people's skin are removed?
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| >What next, an image editor where "Copy image" gives you an
| enhanced image where [...] imperfections on people's skin are
| removed
|
| Nope, not "next", TikTok did that already
|
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/10/1026074/tiktok-m.
| ..
| codetrotter wrote:
| > imperfections on people's skin are removed?
|
| Why stop there? Why not remove the skin altogether :>
| morjom wrote:
| because "Copy Link" tells the user they are about to copy the
| entirety of the link.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| I wish I had this for Twitter links in iOS Safari. It's so
| difficult to scroll to the right and delete all the query
| parameters. I also wish Apple would give me a way to expand the
| URL bar to a word-wrapped input that takes up half the screen. I
| can't stand highlighting text in that tiny little box.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Are there any iOS Safari extensions that do this? Hyperweb
| comes to mind, though I don't know if they offer this specific
| feature.
| VoxPelli wrote:
| Safari have it built in for many pages, all that publish a rel-
| canonical will see Safari share that URL instead - as a way to
| avoid sharing AMP URL:s I believe
|
| Bad that Twitter isn't publishing such or is publishing it with
| tracking
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| I'm not sure it's even Twitter's fault. Usually it happens
| when I click an embedded Tweet from a blog post and then copy
| the URL from the URL bar. It's the blog that adds the
| tracking data. (Does anyone know why a blog would even care
| to do that? Does Twitter offer some kind of analytics
| dashboard where you can segment views of your tweets based on
| query parameters?)
| jaywalk wrote:
| Twitter adds some crap on automatically whenever you click
| "Copy link to Tweet"
|
| Also, they do have an analytics dashboard:
| https://business.twitter.com/en/help/campaign-measurement-
| an...
| manwithaplan wrote:
| > It's so difficult to scroll to the right and delete all the
| query parameters.
|
| A lot of times, all that's needed is to insert a # character at
| the right place in the URL, then load that.
| minitech wrote:
| If you can _get_ to the right place that conveniently,
| Shift+End Delete works without a page load. But getting their
| is its own minor inconvenience.
| dantle wrote:
| I made a Shortcut to strip links. You can add it to the share
| sheet. It'll give you a new share sheet with the stripped link.
| Much faster than mashing backspace.
|
| https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/528c9af856fc46c9a3d164a85e8...
| lapcat wrote:
| > I wish I had this for Twitter links in iOS Safari.
|
| [self-promotion] My extension StopTheMadness does this:
| https://apps.apple.com/app/stopthemadness-mobile/id158308293...
| drcongo wrote:
| I can recommend this. Does lots of other useful things too.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| Nice. I'm a user and I also recommend it.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| I actually have this installed! But I disabled it for some
| reason that I can't remember; I think the defaults were too
| aggressive and I meant to come back and configure it more
| precisely when I had the time. I still need to do that...
| thanks for making it!
|
| The other extension I can absolutely recommend is Vinegar,
| which replaces hostile video players like the one on YouTube
| (which injects JS to close itself if you attempt to use
| picture-in-picture) with a native HTML5 video element.
| samstave wrote:
| FYI/YSK:
|
| When youre on a video with forced ads where you cannot skip
| through them, go PiP on the video and use the arrow keys to
| scrub left or right...
|
| I discovered this, then talked to a buddy at netflix, and
| he said that coding for PiP was a pain because PiP doesnt
| abide by DRM rules.
|
| What would be cool is the ability to pipe a PiP to VLC and
| then use VLC to save out a video....
| lapcat wrote:
| > replaces hostile video players like the one on YouTube
| (which injects JS to close itself if you attempt to use
| picture-in-picture) with a native HTML5 video element.
|
| StopTheMadness also does this. ;-)
| ezfe wrote:
| Does it include a quality picker? Vinegar does more than
| just put a <video> tag in
| lapcat wrote:
| Yes, check out the link above. Auto-select YouTube
| highest video quality, show video controls for all sites
| (not just YouTube), stop autoplaying videos for all sites
| (which also skips YouTube ads), etc.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| Does something like that exist for Reddit? Whatever it is
| they use on their website is a janky piece crap.
| voisin wrote:
| Looks great! Is the one purchase price for use across iOS and
| MacOS? Or two separate purchases?
| lapcat wrote:
| Separate purchases.
| tonylemesmer wrote:
| Does it work in firefox ios? (Hoping webview makes it work
| but dont really understand extensions on ios)
| lapcat wrote:
| No, just Safari.
| nvahalik wrote:
| Love this extension!
| kragen wrote:
| I want this feature so much, every time I try to copy a link from
| Fecebutt or Google and paste it elsewhere. This may be what gets
| me to switch to Brave.
| jug wrote:
| If you get the ClearURLs extension for Chromium or Firefox and
| follow a link with junk at the end, it will strip it. But I
| couldn't get it to clean what goes into the clipboard and
| indeed this would be the best.
| codetrotter wrote:
| I use this sometimes and I love it. I just wish I could configure
| the browser to make this the default always when I copy a link.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| This is a good feature. Arc has a slightly better implementation
| of this. Cmd+shift+C is the copy current tab URL shortcut, and it
| removes trackers by default and lets you know it's "a clean URL
| without trackers :)" in the flash notification. I'd like to see
| Brave similarly make the default copy clean and add a copy with
| trackers second option.
| andai wrote:
| A browser with a waiting list.. now I've seen it all!
| jemmyw wrote:
| Not just a waiting list. You cannot use this browser without
| signing up for an account.
| imbnwa wrote:
| Hide my Email? TBF, for people who are high-sprawl but
| organized, the UI is next-level as it supercedes multiple
| windows/bookmarks as org tools and offers a number of
| affordances that minimize the 'manual resource management',
| if you will, of legacy browser UIs.
| xmprt wrote:
| It's also your s p a c e to breathe on the internet...
| Whatever that means.
| presentation wrote:
| To be fair I'm using Arc and it's the best browser UX
| I've ever experienced, although it's still Chromium.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| For the lazy, clicking [Try it for yourself] asks for your
| email to notify you when "your spot is ready and waiting!".
|
| https://arc.net/
|
| Must be a responsibly release, don't want too many powerusers
| flooding the web at once.
| ciwolsey wrote:
| All I learned from that mess of a site is that Arc is a
| browser of some kind.
| throwaway742 wrote:
| >the Browser Company of New York
|
| lol
| jklinger410 wrote:
| IIRC this is Mac only. Although it is developed on top of
| Chromium.
|
| I guess Power Users only use Mac.
| LoganDark wrote:
| > I guess Power Users only use Mac.
|
| Little Snitch and Audio Hijack/Loopback and Sketchapp and
| iA Writer and Inklet certainly think so. There are no
| Windows/cross-platform analogues for any of these. No
| firewall that _suspends_ connections for an interactive
| prompt, no way to create virtual audio devices or route
| audio in Windows, no equivalent to Sketch (Figma comes
| close I guess) and the Windows version of iA Writer is
| pretty pathetic. And Inklet simply doesn 't have a
| Windows equivalent even when I have an official Apple
| Magic Trackpad connected to my computer.
|
| There's just a lot of cool stuff that isn't available for
| other OSes.
| jraph wrote:
| > No firewall that suspends connections for an
| interactive prompt
|
| Didn't ZoneAlarm do that on Windows in the 2000s?
| black_puppydog wrote:
| not sure about sketchapp and inklet, but the first
| examples are extremely platform specific to the point of
| requiring a rewrite for different platforms
| jklinger410 wrote:
| There is absolutely a form of hipster-ism about
| publishing Mac only software. The truth is, it started
| because Mac users are more likely to pay for apps and app
| subscriptions.
|
| So the ironic part is that it's not as much about
| aesthetic or infrastructure or even ease of development
| as it is about economics.
| smsm42 wrote:
| Finally, the revenge of Windows users for all those years
| of "sure we support every platform. I mean every Windows
| platform of course!" (jk of course)
| 1123581321 wrote:
| They're developing a Windows version right now.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| Very cool. When they finally develop a Linux version of
| their Chromium based browser (already cross-platform) I
| will consider giving it a shot.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Sarcasm acknowledged. :) It's okay if you don't like the
| browser I like.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| Not every query string in a URL is about tracking. This will
| break some sites.
|
| EDIT: Correction, they are very conservative with which strings
| are filtered out. See here: https://github.com/brave/brave-
| core/blob/master/browser/net/...
| dymk wrote:
| Where did you read that it removes the whole query string?
| jklinger410 wrote:
| You're right, after looking in their documentation I found
| that they are very conservative with which strings they
| filter out.
|
| They only look for specific KNOWN user-level targeting
| strings to strip. This is actually a very nuanced route for
| them to take. Other plugins will just filter out everything
| following a query.
|
| Here is the fine details for those interested:
| https://github.com/brave/brave-
| core/blob/master/browser/net/...
|
| As a marketer, they do mention that they retain Campaign
| level parameters, however the click ID is more than just a
| user-level identifier. Many times a click ID is the only
| thing that survives different environments in order to
| provide any attribution at all.
|
| In fact, a click ID is much more privacy aware and
| anonymous in every circumstance than a website giving you
| your own user ID. All good web platforms generate a unique
| ID for you, which is not anonymized for the web platform.
| Whereas the click ID is always anonymized for the web
| platform. When you combine the two, you get a very basic
| piece of information: this user clicked this ad. Now those
| websites will still know who you are as a user, and still
| know which campaign you came from, but not when you
| specifically clicked. Wow, what a privacy save!
|
| Removing it does very little to reduce what Google knows
| about you. Google does not need your click ID. The only
| time it is used is for conversion attribution, and it is
| completely anonymized between the ad platform and the
| marketers who run the campaigns.
|
| So this is mostly just sticking it to the little guy, as
| large data platforms don't need ad-level click IDs to track
| you. But if you want to make sure that no marketer ever
| gets credit for driving you to perform an action, then this
| is for you!
| 1123581321 wrote:
| It doesn't strip every query string. It acts as if it has a
| list of known tracking params, but I haven't investigated the
| exact mechanism.
| shockeychap wrote:
| I kinda wish it _did_ remove all querystrings. The vast
| majority of querystrings are nothing more than tracking and
| marketing garbage, and I can handle the rare situation
| where one is needed manually. Stripping from a known list
| of values just means that marketers will start using random
| identifiers with clever ingestion code, making this
| mechanism less useful over time.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Stripping all querystrings would break tons of sites,
| such as this one we're on right now.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| It's even worse than using random query strings. Last
| year, Facebook, Amazon and some other sites started using
| encrypted URLs that can't be decoded and modified before
| hitting the server. The good news is that this won't work
| with just an analytics JS snippet, but the technology
| will get easier to implement and spread over time.
| https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/07/facebook-
| is-n...
| lxgr wrote:
| Unfortunately that won't help as it's perfectly possible
| to add tracking parameters in a static-looking portion of
| a URL.
|
| Removing all query parameters might encourage that
| practice, and ultimately even push sites towards creating
| completely opaque, server-side resolved unique sharing
| URLs.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| Very true. This is a nuclear arms race that I'm afraid
| users will ultimately lose. The kind of fingerprinting
| that has been used to determine TOR users is what the
| end-game ultimately looks like. It's already being done
| anyway. It's very difficult to avoid, and you will not be
| able to use 90% of the mainstream internet if you do.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Klipper (KDE's clipboard tool) lets you set up this sort
| of thing pretty easily. It can take actions when a
| certain type of content is copied. So, you can match on
| "^http[^?]*" and "echo %0" (you can call any program,
| builtins are provided for MIME types, so you can, for
| example, launch a browser when you copy a URL) as the
| action will allow you to replace the copied URL
| automatically/on-request.
| brewdad wrote:
| I'll take a second attempt using Ctrl+C over always copying
| the tracking garbage for 90% of URLs.
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(page generated 2023-03-09 23:00 UTC)