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

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[–] 29 points 11 months ago (30 children)

What is your "privacy" browser... And how did you disable this?

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  • [–] [S] 21 points 11 months ago (29 children)

    It's Firefox, and there's a new "sharing" option in the menu that contains a toggle to disable this

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  • [–] 25 points 11 months ago (5 children)
  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago (16 children)

    Does this happen when you copypaste the URL?

    Because messing with the clipboard is a really scary thing.

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  • [+] [S] -7 points 11 months ago (15 children)

    No, only when using the share button

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  • [–] 19 points 11 months ago (10 children)

    I see you took the screenshot on your phone, I just tried it on mine and had no issues getting the proper link, even after updating it as I wrote this comment.

    Can you describe more about where you encountered it?

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  • [–] 24 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (5 children)

    It's only for links shared via WhatsApp for some reason. Not sure how they know you're sharing to WhatsApp... (Edit: firefox implements a custom share widget instead of the one provided by the OS, so they get a callback when the user selects the target)

    OP is wrong about the "unique" part tho, I get the same URL as them.

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

    Just tried sharing to WhatsApp, using the Firefox share button, on android. Link is normal.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (1 child)

    Well I tried it before commenting, and I see the same thing as OP... I'm on Firefox stable 145.0.1.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    Weird. I'm on 145.0.1 (Build #2016126887), I even tried going to arstechnica.com in case it only happened on certain websites, but the urls Firefox shares to whatsapp are totally normal for me. Some sort of A/B testing?

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  • [–] [S] -4 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    They detect sharing on WhatsApp and inject the tracking link only on that case. It didn't do this yesterday so there's a chance it's on a/b testing

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

    You sure it's not WhatsApp that's link-shortening?

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

    Then just don't use it? Just copy the link from the url bar, the link is not even unique and it's the same for everyone and other than that you can delete the link so i don't see the problem, is really that wrong for a browser that risk to be oppressed by the chrorium monopoly to advertise itself? It's not even invasive...

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago

    Sharing is much quicker than copy/pasting manually, especially with direct share targets.

    It might not be the end of the world, but Mozilla really should have made the "feature" opt-in, or at least give us a heads up.

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  • [+] -2 points 11 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago* (2 children)

    DDG tracks its users? Is there any definitive proof of this?

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

    https://factually.co/fact-checks/technology/does-duckduckgo-track-you-809f45

    https://blog.ssuiteoffice.com/articles/general/duckduckgo-privacy-controversy.htm

    tldr; DDG specifically allows Microsoft, a company that profits from collecting specific user data, to collect some (anonymous) user data through its ad program.

    I don't think it's proven that DDG creates user profiles like Google does, more that there is a concern that they receive their money from Microsoft, or that they have agreements with Microsoft to send them any data in the first place.

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  • [–] 10 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (7 children)

    Is that a unique tracking link? It looks more like a regular short link. I call fake news on this one.

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

    Firefox is no longer a privacy browser.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    Besides tor, known any other alternatives?

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

    "Here is an option for you to anonymously browse, but you will have to let us know where you are going first" type anonymity.

    Edit: I forgot to tell anonymity and privacy are two different things. Just telling it because some people might think they serve the same purpose.

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  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago

    I like the duckduckgo browser

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