this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2023
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Privacy
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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I do this because I hate super long URL's, but is this actually a problem for privacy? Does it not actually fuck with the tracking because now two separate people have got the same tracking Params? (Genuine question).
Nope. It's a nightmare. The ad company now knows that you are friends or family
But what If you send it via social media like Lemmy or Reddit?
Then they know who's the poster (you), they can know your username if they want to. A lot of people use the same username in many places, so unless you use different usernames in different social media, it's still valuable data.
If not that, seeing how the content spreads through social media and analyzing the reach is interesting data by itself.
Most tracking parameters actually just specify the source the link came from. Like Twitter or an email. I don't see a lot of tracking parameters that literally are tried to an individual account. But here you seem to be saying that's the most common type of tracking param
Try sharing Instagram post or YouTube video from the apps.
Instagram adds 'igshid=' . YouTube adds 'si='.
Try sharing the same IG or YouTube content from different accounts. The 'igshid', 'si' param value will be different
It can be used to tag who shares it, and who clicks on that specific url param.
TikTok hides a ton of such params behind shortened url. Try expanding tiktok shared urls.
Then they know that person follows you
I click links on Lemmy all over the place, I don't follow anyone in particular?
I wouldn't go as far as to say that once two people have clicked on the same tracking link the company behind it can tell what your relation is directly. What they will know is that the two or more people are connected in some way, to then infer in what way, they need other circumstantial data, maybe they have an account on that website and they share the surname or, even easier, without account they can tell that the requests came from IPs that come from a circumscribed area, and on and on, the more data points you add the better predictions the company can make.
If several IPs from disparate places in the world use the same link they can probably tell that the link was shared on social media, not knowing which one, but it was sent in a public internet space at least