Recently I’ve become a little more paranoid about this. I also try to remove them when I post anywhere besides private discord server, but I’m wondering how justified my paranoia is and if it’s something I should encourage others to be cautious about.

  • TheDeed [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    5 months ago

    Delete it or use clearurl like another poster mentioned. The tokens in URLs can be used to transmit any sort of info about you to whatever server is serving the URL.

    The tokens don't always transmit personal info, sometimes it's mundane shit like "did this link get clicked from an email vs a partner website?" without any identifying info - but you can never be sure unless the tracking parameters are in plain text, like http://MyAwesomeAppsite.com/about?referral=email (There are more standard ones than this but you get the gist. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTM_parameters)

    Most of the time the token is encoded though, in such a way that human won't understand what's being transmitted but the server will: http://MyAwesomeAppsite.com/about/a?qj277ebehkde0a72cb2a2c7

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_string#Tracking

    Point is it's probably never useful for you to click a link like this.