rcanzlovar.com

GitHub

a short primer on link tracking

October 4, 2026

I typed this up for someone on facebook, thought it might be helpful to put it here

PSA: When you repost a link from youtube (and lots of other stuff) remove the “?si=blabla123”

This is a tracking code that links you and your viewing history to anyone who clicks on your link. You know how you didn’t search something but you talked about it and suddenly you’re getting ads for the thing? You didn’t search for it but perhaps someone linked to you did.

Same with links from facebook - usually everything after the “?” can be dropped (test it to be sure if you can) as it is also tracking info that facebook adds to any link you click on the site.

What follows is more techie garbage, but the tl;dr bottom line is this:

Every link on facebook has tracking junk in it. The simplest way to remove the facebook tracking, like if you wanted to send it in an email or text instead or if you wanted to bookmark it for later reference without further helping Facebook, is to click the facebook link, let it open in a new tab, and copy/paste/bookmark the URL from that tab. You still might have to remove the ?si= junk as YouTube isn’t the only site that uses that format for tracking purposes.

Obviously this is easier on a PC than on a phone. Often I’ll paste it into some kind of notepad app (anywhere that you can edit it yourself), remove the crap manually there.

The rest below might make your eyes glaze over, ignore if you want:

Inside HTML, what you see isn’t necessarily where you’re going. The HTML tag looks like this (spaces and “x” added for illustration):

Most HTML (how the website makes what you see) looks like < tag >content< /tag>. A link looks like this:

< a href=xhttps://example.com/something something&param1=something?param2=something >The text or image you see< /a >

Here is what facebook did to your link if you copy and paste it. This is the link that you would actually be sharing if you shared the link you have above. I added x before the https so it wouldn’t be interpreted in this comment.

This part is techie junk, but it helps if you decide to share one from facebook. Breaking it down, the first part is the main part of the URL, and it uses ? and & to separate different parameter=something. The basic form is xhttps://url.com?foo=bar&bla1=something&bla2=somethingElse etc.

This is the main URL. Even though you’re sharing a youtube link, you end up hitting a facebook server first so they can save who clicked what and when before sending you on to the youtube link you wanted.

You can see that your link is encoded here. The / slashes . have been replaced with %2F, the : is %3A, %3D is the ?. These are a way to encode an ASCII character in a way that doesn’t scramble the link. any time you see %XX you’re encoding the ascii value into a number that can be translated back to a single character. As you can see, they already added their junk. Once you convert it back, it would look like this:

"?fbclid=" is Facebook’s version of the ?si= bit that was on your YouTube link.

All the rest of it is stuff that facebook uses to track who clicked where and it gets stored in their servers. The rest is more of the same, and unnecessary outside of Facebook.

I don’t know what the rest of these do exactly, but it’s more tracking. Notice that it breaks down to parameter=value:

&h=AUCQfFYSzABNiyMgJwYQ50sZhZtu9EgceorpeL0BVs117L2x_BcI2q_5YABXeGsRNu4KwNXZNC5sCIt9_IrYRHqK6NzsKD-F8N4QfTwJ7fxxq6_HKpZZaHgB503b8RrBBSn58Q

&__tn__=-UK-R

&c[0]=AUANHHP6ey4Q6h5wYku-FhnsbGEALIjhLGOJdfofw9waBkludG_GFA9QW4EfYwwsgphKPlKD_QynDaZcf3UOWkSInGpfEywMwWFf3DQ9NF4xfA1xaKE8aiswnwB2roMK_7lyu8PM7XCyHhZdlg

I hope you found this helpful. tl;dr: All this crap is how they spy on your activity.

Keywords: blog
Reply via email
← pot doesn't exist any more

© 2026 rcanzlovar.com | About | Contact | Privacy Policy | RSS Feed