Whenever you visit a website through a link, your device connects to the servers of that website. So if you open a YouTube link, then YouTube sees your device connected to it. This is why people use VPNs because it masks the IP address of the device and makes it more difficult to identify who you are across different websites/apps.

Most websites add trackers to the end of their URLs when you try to share a link. The tracker usually starts after a ? or & symbol. Everything after the ? or & symbol is information that is intended to track and/or identify you. Removing it won’t break the link, but it will prevent the website from connecting your identity to the person sharing it with you.

If people on nostr open your links with trackers, then the website knows there is some kind of connection between you two. The tracker bot on nostr is just telling people to remove the tracker and it provides the link without the tracker for others to open. It’s a very helpful bot for promoting privacy.

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Usually I clean my links by myself but very few times I forgot. This bot is the most useful bot of all. Love it!

Yeah I do too but sometimes I see people post a link to an article with a ridiculously long tracker attached that clearly says it’s from an email newsletter. Makes me want to rip my hair out 😂

good to know

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This is really important to know.

Also know that Apple stuff will go around your VPN.

Also know that Android devices can leak your IP in certain circumstances.

Also know that Amethyst has built-in Tor for an extra layer of privacy.

nostr:nevent1qqsvamcvm7frv34lrumm2pyr9faxtqm83pya5cnzrjyc4vr9mhy90nspzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujucm0d9hx7uewd9hj7q3qghcetnluhryhynhuyj8s2pazldjm27wl40nu6dfeskvpv09twcnsxpqqqqqqzflekkp

Might some link posters want and benefit in some way by having the link let the site know that they shared the link? Not my thing, but something I've wondered about 🤔

If you believe that websites having a more data on you to create an accurate profile of you for advertising purposes is beneficial then yes.

Maybe someone with a public identity and a youtube channel can get their channel more promoted by youtube by allowing youtube to see that they are sharing links? I very much prefer clean links and do not follow unclean without cleaning first which means I usually just skip unclean links. Just trying to understand why some that I'd think understand still post unclean links. Regardless, thanks for time you've spent explaining 🙏

they can and do however the side effect and the $$$ behind the interaction is the tracking and data collection. this is the same thing for fiat typical web APIs. they have to recover costs and make a profit so they make it invisibly from unaware users and sell their data then use it to manipulate them. any time an app uses a Google API, Google collects data.

If you're interested in the type of data per app, go here. It'll show per app which tracker and you can expand the tracker to show the data that is typically collected. [check an app] is what you want. The aurora store for Android (a proxy to install official APKs shows data from Exodus if you scroll down past the comments.

https://exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/

#fiatinternetcommerce

Good info and website! Thank you 🙏

if you're on Android, there's a little app called Léon that can strip tracking from URLs before sharing. totally configurable. it's on the Play store and Fdroid.

https://github.com/svenjacobs/leon

How does it strip the URLs? I don’t have android yet

it intercepts the share dialogue. you select url cleaner (léon) to share a url to and it strips the garbage and gives you the share dialogue again to give it to whichever target app.

you can register it as a browser as well.

Thanks for the recommendation