Jesus, now that its terrifying!

What would even be the point of a link that allows you that? Like, why was it designed to do that!?

Props to that person who PM'd you the warning.

I've been out as queer since I was 14. I'm in my 30, he still hasn't come around.

Given his age and health, if he's planning too come around he'd better get on it quick, at this rate he's dying a bigot.

I'm not waiting any more, I put my whole life on hold waiting for him to come around so I could live my life safely. If I need to cut him out of my life I will.

I appreciate they kind words, but please keep in mind mind that it's not always smart or safe to tell a trans person to be patient. The individual will know their level of safety, and advice to be patient and understanding can in some cases case be very, very harmful.

Apparently it doesn’t work with YouTube. That’s an elephant sized hole.

How do I use this feature? I'm a Firefox user since quantum and had no idea this was a thing.

I used that so much when I was creating purchase orders. Nobody needs to know how I got to that page.

uBlock Origin also has a filter built-in, though you have to enable it. It's under Filter Lists > Privacy > AdGuard URL Tracking Protection

YouTube has an even better example of it being problematic to strip the parameters. The original video links look like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

The thing is, the stuff after the question mark isn't inherently bad, we just have the convention that the path (/watch) should identify a static resource on the server, whereas the stuff after the question mark is more variable or user-specific.

But YouTube is older than that convention. If YouTube got built today, that URL would look more like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch/dQw4w9WgXcQ

On the other hand, the URL of a specific search result page would still look the same, even with today's conventions, because it doesn't identify a static resource:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=never+gonna+give+you+up

you set it up as your default browser

You don't have to. You can just copy any URL and share it to the app. Then copy it from the app.

Specifically, you can “share” it to yourself, open that link in an incognito tab, then strip out everything but the user and video id

https://www.tiktok.com/@USERNAME/video/LONGSTRINGOFDIGITS

You have to do the same thing with Amazon a.co links I think

Firefox already has a copy without tracking built in

The problem is that these parameters can also do useful things, i.e. removing them might break the link. There's no inherent criteria to determine whether a parameter is used for tracking or not.

The way these extensions or Firefox' built-in feature works, is that they check for 'well-known' parameters. For example, lots of URLs contain parameters starting with utm_, which is from Google Analytics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTM_parameters

As such, it's for example unlikely that someone would build a website which uses a parameter utm_medium with a value of social, without it being used for tracking, so that gets removed.
But if someone builds a website that puts your full name into a parameter called potato, there's just no way to automatically detect and remove that.

Yes there is: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clearurls/

Hi yes, my name is Tim Microsoft, I live at 123 Microsoft St, Microsoft, CA 12345-6789

it was on me to use my real name. at the same time for any online purchase I use my real name so I didn't give it second thought.

I just thought it was very wrong of them to expose that to friends list. I pick a nickname for a reason, so people see my nickname.