Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
It encodes the contents of the search bar.
E.g. for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw&pp=ygUTZmlyc3QgeW91dHViZSB2aWRlbw%3D%3D
ygUTZmlyc3QgeW91dHViZSB2aWRlbw== is first youtube video in base64, which is what I typed into the search bar to find that video.
Not sure if that's actually useful for tracking or if there's another technical reason for it, but at the very least it could accidentally expose your search terms to others if you end up sharing links like that.
that's interesting. do you perhaps also know what the si param contains?
Oh, that's how you get it. I just tried it and got the regular si link which doesn't seem to have valid b64 data.
gotta chop off the pp
Wasn’t their a Firefox plugin that did this? I recall a while ago to help do the same with Amazon but I never installed it and I don’t remember what it was called…
Firefox has "copy link without site tracking" built in now
Doesn't work for &pp= yet, though. At least, it doesn't on ESR (and, by extension, Tor Browser and Mullvad Browser).
I think the extension you're talking about is ClearURL.
Lmfao, this community has automatically removed the si= suffix in my second link. But it didn't remove the pp= suffix....
Edit: Fixed, finally. It kept trying to convert my links all over the place. They're not meant to be links, just a clear description of the syntax.
Thanks for shedding light on this. I've also noticed the same thing on Instagram links. They now have a "igsh=" added to track sharing.
Since a long time, out of respect for others, I only share YT videos like this: youtube,com/embed/[video_ID]
respect for others
But also yourself. Like this you won't get grouped by Google with other people online.
I know, that is the idea
https://openuserjs.org/scripts/Kraust/Youtube_Embed_Redirect
Little script with few bytes, I installed it as extension. It redirect embedded when I click on a YT link or open a video in a new tab. It0s more confortable as edit the URL by hand, the script don't do other than this. Apart you can watch it in full tab size, better quality and without ads. You can search the Video also with Andi and watch it there embedded and sandboxed in the search result.
What about that youtu.be one
So long as there's no extra suffix after, it shouldn't be so bad. So if you have youtu.be/?v=[video_ID] it's fine, but if there's a &si= or &pp= or &anything=, then that's most likely tracking and should be removed.
? is the start of the suffixes, & denotes a change in suffix. Every video has a v= suffix to denote the video itself, but everything else isn't needed.
? is the start of the suffixes, & denotes a change in suffix
Technically speaking they are query parameters not suffixes.