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Chrome 64 Now Trims Messy Links When You Share Them (theverge.com)
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.
I usually manually trim everything after the ? in the link, but now I won't have to
I have no problem with this feature under a "share" button, but plain-old copy and paste are not a tag-team synonym for sharing in any sane world.
The PC revolution was largely built on determinism at scale: the same operation repeated (on your machine, or the next machine) achieves the same results. This was pretty new in the world in the late seventies. It's why we became able to build more complex distributed systems than ever before; it's how we ultimately carved our way out of spaghetti-code mountain.
Now we take this boon for granted, and the pendulum continues to swing back toward infantilization.
Now copy, too, is apparently on its way to sloppy seconds (the way of all things shared too much, howsoever assiduously groomed).
Absolutely nothing wrong can happen when someone else can randomly change the link to where you are trying to get.
There is zero change that the link can be replaced to a fake location that looks like the original, but is nothing but a phishing website.
Obviously this is just a means for google to attack other companies -- the ones that actually need an identifier to be passed around with you to track a link rather than just having a huge database on you already (like google does).
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.
From TFA: It also recently introduced automatic blocks for bad and unwanted ads...
In other words, it blocks ads that don't contribute to the Google revenue stream. That's what they mean by Bad Ads.
I'm pretty sure the market will adapt to whatever Chrome does, ensuring that things don't break.
Are we saying that there's no longer a way to get the full URL to the clipboard? That would be intensely annoying in many situations. Is this a feature on mobile only?
And how do they know what they can safely trim? It they only do this for sites they understand then this should mostly work well but you can bet on annoying issues elsewhere. I guess understanding some of the common platforms like WordPress, Drupal, etc. could help but there are so many versions of those with constant updates that it's bound to trip up sometimes.
So this feature will mostly work and provide some convenience for the masses but the price is going to be confusion and annoyance for those who know their way around a URL, plus random breakage.
Maybe this is a sign that websites are using URLs in the wrong way. Can't they just move all that stuff Google is trying to hide into cookies and/or form fields instead so the URLs are kept vaguely human readable and not crazily long?
How exactly does it determine what information to keep and which to dump. I've got a sneaking suspicion that the answer is there is a server it sends the URL to in order to be cleaned so that it will always be up to date for thousands of sites without needing to distribute changes. The downside of this is that (obviously?) they will now be tracking every single URL that you copy. #AllTechIsEvil #GoingAmish2018 ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Google is orders of magnitude worse now than Microsoft ever was back when Microsoft was still relevant. Using their monopoly to extend their monopoly and break competition will eventually lead down the road to government intervention.
Aren't a good percentage of the GET parameters floating around out there Google Analytics parameters (i.e. utm_campaign1, utm_a, etc.)? Aren't they just cleaning up their own company's mess?
They should probably make this an optional feature that can be disabled.
BTW - I think this proves that they're tracking everything people do in Chrome. How else could they roll out such a computer paradigm-breaking feature with such confidence (on by default)?
It does not delete the tracking information, it just doesn't show it to you so you don't know its there or not.
From the linked article:
"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."
From the actual article, that Verge sponged from:
"The URL streamlining happens automatically when you use the Share menu in Chrome (but not Chrome Custom Tabs). You can copy to the clipboard or share directly to another app—no setup required. If you highlight the URL bar and select text manually, you can still get the full URL with all the junk at the end."
Whoever paraphrased that for Verge doesn't understand how to read.
FC Closer
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: ... they're not trying to shorten jack shit. There's no real benefit to the user.
https://www.google.com/url?q=h...
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.
I expect this is just step one. Once Chrome users are used to this, then Google will introduce step 2. That may be Google rewriting the links to channel everything through AMP, or it may be something less blatant but more insidious.
It's just another reason not to use IE6... er, I mean, Google Chrome. They're just going to keep taking further and further advantage of their dominant market position to go into full-MS mode. Twenty years from now, people will be amazed that anyone saw Google as anything but the second coming of Y2K Microsoft.
#DeleteChrome
Co's will just start putting tracking data in other parts of the URL, such as:
www.foo.com/tracking-crap1234/page-x.com
Table-ized A.I.
But now they've broken it. Why? To make tracking more accurate.
When you follow the link, the web server gets the tracking data. When you send a copy to someone else and they follow it, the tracking info pointing to you is gone so the web server doesn't think you clicked again.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
They accomplish this by hiding the tracking information, not by removing it. The latter might afford you some privacy, and hurt Google's bottom line. The former gives you an illusion of privacy while they ramp up the tracking even further. Basically, they are putting URLs onto the clipboard as HTML instead of plain text.