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Chrome 64 Now Trims Messy Links When You Share Them (theverge.com)

Posted by msmash on from the rid-of-weird-things dept.

Google's latest consumer version of Chrome, version number 64, just started cleaning up messy referral links for you. From a report: Now, when you go to share an item, you'll no longer see a long tracking string after a link, just the primary link itself. This feature now happens automatically when sharing links in Chrome, either by the Share menu or by copying the link and pasting it elsewhere. Even though it slices off the extra bit of the URL, this doesn't affect referral information. If you choose, you can copy and paste directly from the URL bar to grab the link in entirety.

3 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. that's fantastic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I usually manually trim everything after the ? in the link, but now I won't have to

  2. Except for Google themselves by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As an experiment I tried copying a URL from Google Ads.

    Guess what?

    I got the full, mangled URL, not the clean version that they do for their competitors.

    Thanks Google. You truly have your user's interests at heart.

  3. Re:Also ironic that Google cleaning up their own m by unrtst · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Maybe I just haven't read far enough in the replies, but it seems like everyone so far is missing the point and reaching for other reasons/defects/etc. AFAICT, the motivation and everything else is very simple...

    When one shares a link that includes tracking information, and someone else uses that link, it weakens the value of the tracked info/user, because it's no longer tracking one user. The further that link spreads, the more diluted and useless that tracking identifier becomes. If they can strip it before it gets spread around, they can maintain more accurate data.

    This isn't a them just cleaning up their own mess. This isn't them helping to keep your shared URL's shorter or cleaner. This isn't to help protect anyone from leaking tracking ids. This doesn't cut down on the amount of tracking done to users. It just improves the tracking they're already doing, all while (effectively) hiding that from you a little bit so you're less likely to be bothered by it.

    To reinforce that theory, just look at the links they create in hangouts and gmail. Here's what "https://slashdot.org/" looks like when you "copy link address" and paste it:
            https://www.google.com/url?q=h... ... they're not trying to shorten jack shit. There's no real benefit to the user.

    Back to the share link thing, IMO, there should at least be a config item to set which keys get trimmed per-site, and maybe allow that to be configured by the site via a META tag.