When you share a YouTube video using the share button it adds “si=some_unique_code” to the URL. If you don’t remove that it shows your personal account to anyone who receives it so that they can chat directly with you. For a lot of people this is their real name.
I’ve seen it all over Lemmy so I figured I’d mention it here! You only need the stuff before the question mark in the URL to let others see the video.
This can also be turned off in your YouTube settings under the privacy section. The setting is “channel visibility for shared links”. It will still add the si code for tracking though.
It can’t share my personal account if I’m never signed in.
Pipepipe does not include this tracking, by default.
Hopefully NewPipe does the same, as PipePipe’s successor.
I’m preeeeety sure PipePipe is the successor. Or atleast a different fork with more updates.
You are correct. Or, rather, not the successor but an independent fork (doesn’t necessarily adopt upstream changes).
I don’t know what the hell I saw just the other day. I am 100% certain that I read that some GitHub project I was looking at said it was a fork of PipePipe, or in reverse, that “you should use NewPipe as it supersedes this repo”.
🤨 I need to dive into my browser history…
Edit: ah! It was PipePipe! I just misinterpreted this line:
NewPipe, reimagined: faster, more stable, and packed with more features.
I took this to mean:
NewPipe is a reimagined fork of this project, which is faster, more stable, and packed with more features.
🤦♂️💁♂️ D’oh.
Newpipe and Tubular also share videos without the tracking, by default.
Nice!
Grayjay does too.
Same with freetube (which can be used for both mobile and desktop)
Same with LibreTube.
Revanced strips it when copying or sharing the video url
YSK PieFed automatically strips that out.
Thats great!
Like if you post a YouTube link, the platform detects it and automatically edits the link?
Yeah
Edit: I posted this from PieFed, and it preserved the “?si=” part of the URL, which I have since edited out by hand.
It doesn’t do it in comments, just when you make a post.
IMO You should add that detail to your top-level comment, as it’s going to be seen by more people than this clarification that definitely runs counter to how I interpreted your comment.
They might be talking about the default web interface.
That’s what I use!
Pretty cool!
FYI on desktop you can right click on the video and select “Copy video URL”, it doesn’t include the tracker string. Wish they’d let us remove it from the Share button, I’ve simply removed that button with uBlock Origin.
It’s also missing from my patched YouTube app’s Share on Android, not sure if that’s one of the patches.
Yeah, that’s certainly a patch. NewPipe, PipePipe, etc. all also remove
?si=.
Here’s another. If the video you want to share is on youtube, it’s also on invidious. Without ads, downloadable and just generally none of youtube’s bullshit. It even uses the same video vURL address.
tbh I would still prefer receiving the raw youtube link so everybody can redirect it to their preferred way of watching e.g. Morphee. Invidious instances can go down or stop working.
I haven’t had a positive experience with an invidious instance in years. They are usually either down or horribly slow for me.
Me neither. Even tried to host it locally at home it the hopes that a private IP would go under googles radar, but after a month or so they blocked me as well. Same goes for LibreTube NewPipe and what not. All just fail on me after a while. The only way is to make it usable with uBlock + Unhook and Morphee Patches on Android. Its honestly not a bad experience except for the added
setTimeoutwhen Youtube notices. :)
If you never sign into YouTube and sharing links from a third party application, what is it that they append? Curious what makes up that shared id.
Might not solve everything, but a good link cleaner utility is helpful too. I personally use this one: Trackless Links
I just share the URL from the browser.
Even on mobile: I don’t use the YouTube app. On Android, this is a no-brainer, since you can run Firefox and uBlock Origin and bypass all the ads. On iOS it is a bit more dicey, but still advantageous to forego the app. Currently DuckDuckGo can bypass the ads for free. If you don’t mind paying, Wipr2 can also do it, in Safari. Then you just put a web shortcut to YouTube and bam, ad-free YouTube. Shitty icon though (it’s the regular icon in a white squircle). Either way, share from the browser, not YouTube.
Also, of course you can remove all the extra shit from the URL if you know how. That wisdom is lost on younger generations, but innate to older ones (who grew up around tech, like Millennials; or younger Gen X who adopted it at a young age — not like these iPad babies you have now).
I don’t see how it’s a generational thing. I remember when every link included the page type at the end, meaning there was nothing that could be truncated. If you don’t know what si stands for or don’t know that anything after a ? Is tracking bullshit, then you simply don’t know. It’s a “knowledgeable person” thing that can be learned at any time. I’ve pointed it out and many people I know still don’t care
I don’t see how it’s a generational thing.
People who grew up when smartphones were already a thing might never have needed to learn how the Internet and URLs actually work. To a lot of everyday users nowadays, the Internet is just a series of smartphone or tablet apps you switch between. I used to think that the spread of the Internet into more segments of society would create a society of computer nerds, ha ha ha ha ha nope.
As a web developer, everything after the ? is actually parameters for the request. Anything could be in there, even important stuff (though hopefully nothing identifying, since that is extremely unsecure). You will likely break functionality if you delete everything without knowing what it is.
Usually parameters are easy to understand. Like the time parameter in yt URLs, which is t=180 (meaning 180 seconds from the beginning of the video). Usually, parameters that are a string of seemingly random letters are UIDs or tracking parameters. Whenever I see a URL with one or multiple of those, I start deleting them and seeing if the URL still works. In 90% of the cases, it still does. Amazon is one of the worst offenders, with usually 4 or 5 random looking parameters that can be deleted without affecting the functionality of the URL.
if it’s obfuscated, then it’s assumed to be malicious
People can’t even unanimously agree on when each generation starts and ends (see terms like “zillenial” or “xillenial”) so I’d even go so far as to say it’s a completely redundant concept in the colloquial sense. Obviously most people care more about continuing to use the “kids these days” rhetoric so it hardly matters regardless, but it doesn’t make it any less ridiculous.
Blurry deliberations are typical. As time goes on, “millennial” will become more accurate as the differences between xennial and zillennial become smaller and smaller in comparison to differences between _ennial and alpha or beta or delta. I just take issue with acting like direct url interface was the experience of a generation, and not a short-lived blip for the gen pop that has already been forgotten, especially as full url purpose has shifted to something arguably evil.
Blurry deliberations are typical.
Yes, though my point that I wanted to add is that people seem to treat generational terms as if they’re a fact of reality instead of a very shaky conceptualization of cultural differences between birth groups that are already influenced by a lot more factors than just when people are born. It’s much more of a spectrum than a strict range of demographics inherent to humanity.
It should be common practice if you commonly share links. Try removing the query string (everything after and including the question mark). See if you get to the same page. If you do, don’t use the query string.
Query string parameters are rather often used for tracking. Look for gclid parameters after you click a google ad, for example.
The harder ones to bypass are Facebook and Reddit share URLs, which give zero indicator of their destination; it seems impossible as the recipient of such a URL.
At least with bit.ly, one can add a
+to the end of the URL and see data on it, including the original link (to then safely access without adding to its click counter).Yeah, there are always ways… any service could easily generate unique paths that require a server-supplied redirection to the main target. Then the server just needs to stitch up (1) where was that link generated and (2) who arrived at the redirection page. Users would have no way to determine the target link without exposing themselves to being tracked.
A platform like Reddit can do this too, by replacing the links you put in your comments/post, so they redirect to the original link. They can even make it continue displaying the original link, while actually linking to the redirect page.
Right, I’ve seen Slickdeals and I think Bing eventually take that on over the years: on-mouse-hover shows the original link, temporarily, until you actually right-click and copy, at which point the evil reveals itself lol.
Hmm… now I wonder if a browser add-on could circumvent the right-click interaction and stealth-copy the originally displayed link… lol, it’s nuts how far into the weeds of privacy our guerrilla warfare has been getting.
Facebook and Instagram do the same btw. Just FYI.
It would be great if link cleaning and auto-mirroring was part of the lemmy UI itself.
The problem is that there is an almost infinite way to design these kinds of URLs, so maintaining a database of what should be stripped out isn’t trivial.
Yeah, would be best within particular client implementations. Not core Lemmy tho. Too many ways to do this and high maintenance.
I think that would probably be a client implemented feature, not a Lemmy one. I also don’t design social medias, so I don’t really know.
You should also known that TikTok does this by default and the generated code is impossible to remove afaik, it’s part of the video identifier.
So when sharing a tiktok video always download it and share the file.
I recommend downloading it anyway, since that doesn’t require people to use tiktoks site, but if you paste the vm link yourself into a browser, it’ll redirect to the canonical link, without the tracker.
I use this on Android to sanitise links I sent out as well as clean incoming links before viewing them.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.svenjacobs.app.leon
Along similar lines be careful of the images you post if you location tag your photos. A lot of the larger websites will strip the location data by default but some do not. I’ve saved a handful of photos from reviews off the internet and now have people’s home addresses where the photo is of the product in their living room or whatever.
If you go to the ‘map’ section of your photos app it arranges them by location.
You can turn location tagging off globally when photos are taken or usually when you go to share a photo there is an option buried in a menu to strip location data(on mobile).
I have an iOS shortcut that remove exit meta data.
You can turn location tagging off globally
That’s one of the first things I did when configuring my kids phones.
Done. Thank you.
