Respecting privacy when sharing an article link from Facebook (and not only)
Have you by any chance noticed the URL when sharing an article, blog post or webpage on which you landed clicking on a Facebook link? It looks like this:
The actual link you want is the part before the question mark (?). The following part (in bold here) is a unique tracking token that Facebook (and the likes of it) appends to the links you share so that it can track its dissemination. Whenever you share a link from Facebook the generated URL always includes this tracking token. So if you care about privacy do yourself and others a favor and GET RID of this tracker. How can you do this? Just delete the extra characters from the question mark on and share the CLEAN link.
If you are mostly using your Android smartphone to share links check out the Clean Share app. It will do the cleaning job for you! (I don’t know of a similar app for iOS)
Update, 14.06.2020: Clean Share does not clean Facebook tracking tokens by default. You need to add the following at the end of the default rule (you find this when you open Clean Share):
|fbclid
so that the new rule looks like this:
ref|utm|source|clickfrom|sku|spm|pf_rd|_ga|fbclid
Update, 27.06.2020: Apparently this trick also fixes the broken links produced by Facebook in some cases, when you publish or share a link in the Fb timeline or Messanger (see this discussion for context: https://github.com/PrivateBin/PrivateBin/issues/396)
