Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links
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Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links
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Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links
#2I can see urls eventually being thousands of characters long with referral links daisy chained.
Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links
#3FB has already publicly announced some of these changes:
https://www.inc.com/peter-roesler/facebook-to-allow-for-firs...
https://digiday.com/marketing/wtf-what-are-facebooks-first-p...
Basically, FB is expanding its tracking, allowing 1st party vs. their third party cookie tracking. I suspect the click-id query string is part of that rollout. This helps it get around things like Apple's new ITP (Intelligent Tracking Prevention). 2.0 in Safari.
Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links
#4I can see urls eventually being thousands of characters long with referral links daisy chained.
Some already are.
A lot of malicious links are just base64'ed to another redirect service; to another base64'ed address (continue as long as your head can keep up.)
Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links
#5So they're modifying URL? Facebook is breaking things. But sure, they've run the numbers and decided they don't care.
Browsers will now have to resort to removing query parameters to prevent tracking. And websites should really use click-to-enable sharing buttons to prevent Facebook from snooping on everything.
Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links
#6I can see urls eventually being thousands of characters long with referral links daisy chained.
Some already are. A lot of malicious links are just base64'ed to another redirect service; to another base64'ed address (continue as long as your head can keep up.)
I'd expect something like uBlock stripping this off.
Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links
#7I wonder why would fb move away from the well-established utm [1] link parameters to this? From the article, I can't see any functional difference.
Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links
#8[deleted]
Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links
#9So they're modifying URL? Facebook is breaking things. But sure, they've run the numbers and decided they don't care. Browsers will now have to resort to removing query parameters to prevent tracking. And websites should really use click-to-enable sharing buttons to prevent Facebook from snooping on everything.
My guesstimate is that the number of URLs that are shared on Facebook AND that already have a completely orthogonal "fbclid" parameter is infinitesimal.
Maybe among the URLs shared on Facebook there are a few whose servers only respond to a fixed amount of parameters, changing their behaviour when additional unused parameters are appended to the query string, but I imagine that the number of such cases is so low it's not even worth considering.
What exactly is Facebook breaking, in your opinion?
Would Facebook also break things if they were instead making an async request to the destination and appending a custom header to it, something like "X-Coming-From-Facebook"?
Re: Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links
#10I wonder why would fb move away from the well-established utm [1] link parameters to this? From the article, I can't see any functional difference. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTM_parameters
Many links will already been submitted with UTM parameters and replacing them may have unintended side effects.