Wow! https://preview.tinyurl.com/examplezoom really shows https://zoom.us/j/123456789 link whereas Chrome network inspector confirms the viglink.com redirect. uBlock origin blocks the latter via Dan Pollock’s hosts file and Peter Lowe’s Ad and tracking server list.
URL shorteners set ad tracking cookies
21–30 of 213 posts
Re: URL shorteners set ad tracking cookies
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Will you die, will your heirs continue to operate this service? Or do consequences beyond your life not concern you? (e.g. "Why should I care about climate change, I'll be dead before it gets bad!" ) To mitigate the harm you've already caused, you should put the service into a read-only mode and contact Archive Team about handing off the database. You should do this today, before you get hit by a bus.
What harm have they "already caused"? Is link rot such a damaging phenomenon that it warrants attacking hobbyists and their not-for-profit public service? Will you help financially compensate their time setting up these fail-safes?
> What harm have they "already caused"?
They have already inserted themselves as a middleman by shortening URLs, creating an additional point of failure which will inevitably break sooner or later.
> Will you help financially compensate their time setting up these fail-safes?
How about: Blow it out your ass. He made the mess, so if he has any integrity he'll foot the bill for cleaning it up.
Re: URL shorteners set ad tracking cookies
#23Eh, for links to content on my website I just cooked up my own URL shortener using Apache rewrite maps and a little scripting to generate the short codes. Simple, private, and entirely under my control (which also means I don't have to worry about the links breaking).
I did that for a while with a short domain I used to own (urlb.at). Then ended up regretting it and shutting it down. I eventually decided that URL shorteners were a terrible idea for the web and that I wanted the 'actual' URLs out there.
> Then ended up regretting it and shutting it down.
Care to elaborate?
Re: URL shorteners set ad tracking cookies
#24Tinyurl actually has a preview feature, which you can enable by default.
https://preview.tinyurl.com/examplezoom
Curiously, this specific tracking behavior (both the redirect and the cookie) goes away when turning on previews.
(Incidentally, my uBlock origin filters block the VigLink redirect as a tracker, by default, as a sibling commenter points out.)
Re: URL shorteners set ad tracking cookies
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
What harm have they "already caused"? Is link rot such a damaging phenomenon that it warrants attacking hobbyists and their not-for-profit public service? Will you help financially compensate their time setting up these fail-safes?
> What harm have they "already caused"? They have already inserted themselves as a middleman by shortening URLs, creating an additional point of failure which will inevitably break sooner or later. > Will you help financially compensate their time setting up these fail-safes? How about: Blow it out your ass. He made the mess, so if he has any integrity he'll foot the bill for cleaning it up.
It's users choice to use a shortener to shorten their long URLs. Calling shorteners middleman is just wrong.
Re: URL shorteners set ad tracking cookies
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What harm have they "already caused"? They have already inserted themselves as a middleman by shortening URLs, creating an additional point of failure which will inevitably break sooner or later. > Will you help financially compensate their time setting up these fail-safes? How about: Blow it out your ass. He made the mess, so if he has any integrity he'll foot the bill for cleaning it up.
It's users choice to use a shortener to shorten their long URLs. Calling shorteners middleman is just wrong.
The person who uploads the link is not the only affected party. This affects every unrelated person who might ever want to follow those links long after the shortener is dead and gone.
Re: URL shorteners set ad tracking cookies
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's users choice to use a shortener to shorten their long URLs. Calling shorteners middleman is just wrong.
The person who uploads the link is not the only affected party. This affects every unrelated person who might ever want to follow those links long after the shortener is dead and gone.
Any link on the internet - shortened or not - can after some time die. Domain registration expire, websites get shut down. Domain changes ownership and new site goes up. Relax. It's just a lifecycle of Internet resources.
Let us end this conversation. You obviously see things differently.
Re: URL shorteners set ad tracking cookies
#28Wasn't the primary use of URL shorteners to compress a given URL in order to reduce the character count? Given today's Twitter, what are they still used for besides visual convenience?
Do youtu.be, t.co, fb.me and dlvr.it next!
Re: URL shorteners set ad tracking cookies
#29I currently host https://femto.pw/ - A URL shortener I've kept up for ~4 years and intend to indefinitely. It doesn't do anything with regards to tracking cookies or other dark patterns. It just redirects you using a 302 redirect.
FYI that your site is blocked by this list: https://gitlab.com/The_Quantum_Alpha/the-quantum-ad-list
HN post for that list here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25512273
Re: URL shorteners set ad tracking cookies
#30Although "Oh By"[1] is not strictly a URL shortener it can be used as one quite nicely. When used as a URL shortener, there are no cookies, no tracking, and ublock origin shows a nice big zero throughout. This is because the revenue model of Oh By is selling custom/vanity codes - not monetizing user data or advertising. "If you're looking for a dead-simple URL shortener that respects your privacy and doesn't slow you…
. You have to type http:// on the message field To make a redirect
Yes, correct.
The typical use case is a human message, not a URL. If you want a redirect you need to explicitly prefix it like that…