Yes. Buried in the settings there's an option to disable it

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[–] [S] 1 point 11 months ago (6 children)

there's no reason to use a "short" link when it's longer than the real "long" link

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    Perhaps, but that does not mean it's not the case.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 11 months ago* (4 children)

    if i see domain.tld/garbage i have to assume they did it for tracking, not the opposite or for "shortening" it

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    No, that's wrong. All url shorteners work exactly like that. How did you get the initial link anyway?

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 11 months ago* (2 children)

    What do you mean? This is supposed to be sent to my friends. To a friend, a real message would be like "I'm using Firefox, get it at firefox.com" and not "I'm using Firefox, get it at domain.tld/garbage".

    This time the "short" link isn't unique, but they still did this for tracking purposes and not for "convenience". I didn't check it but it will definitely resolve to something like hxxp://Firefox.domain ?utm_source=whatsapp&utm_medium=message&utm_campaign=promo&utm_id=wa-spam&utm_term=share&utm_content=click for maximum tracking analysis

    Edit: TIL Lemmy automatically removes tracking tags from URLs... I had to type again my delicious tracking link...

    Edit2: Lemmy removes tracking tags even from code blocks 😲

    Edit3: Lemmy removes tracking tags even with an invalid protocol

    Edit4: Lemmy removes tracking tags even with invalid TLD

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    That's a helpful analysis! So there is zero tracking in there. It is just anonymous measurement of a campaign, which is perfectly fine. It is NOT person specific.

    What i didn't understand is if this link to Firefox was inserted by you at all. It looks like it was appended to a completely unrelated link that you wanted to share. So Firefox hijacked your message to insert a second link. Is that correct? Because that would infuriate me. I found this seeing in my Firefox and it defaulted to be active.

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