My "privacy" browser now adds an extra unique tracking URL to every link that I share, to advertise itself and track the opening rate
Yes. Buried in the settings there's an option to disable it
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What is your "privacy" browser... And how did you disable this?
It's Firefox, and there's a new "sharing" option in the menu that contains a toggle to disable this
Here is a sanitized Firefox fork https://librewolf.net/
Librewolf my beloved
There's Waterfox as well, but I still prefer Librewolf.
Why's that? Asking as a Firefox user.
Don't forget Ironfox for mobile!
Thanks! I like their limitations page
How exactly are you getting these in the first place? I just tried to share the url but it didn't do anything odd.
Does this happen when you copypaste the URL?
Because messing with the clipboard is a really scary thing.
No, only when using the share button
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?
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.
Just tried sharing to WhatsApp, using the Firefox share button, on android. Link is normal.
Well I tried it before commenting, and I see the same thing as OP... I'm on Firefox stable 145.0.1.
Ah interesting!
That explains why I don't see it!
If the link it's the same for everyone then they should have definitely used firefox.com or a dedicated domain, not domain.tld/garbage
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
You sure it's not WhatsApp that's link-shortening?
Yes because the option to remove the advertisement link is inside Firefox. It might be that meta and Mozilla got some monetary agreement and this is even worse
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...
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.
They promote themselves as a privacy browser, so they should have placed a splash screen "help us spread", with the toggle to add the ads in my chats. Having that link on by default is not pretty, especially in WhatsApp conversations where you share ten links
You can disable it…
There's a ESR release.
DDG tracks its users? Is there any definitive proof of this?
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.
Very interesting, thank you for providing this info! 🙏
Firefox is no longer a privacy browser.
Besides tor, known any other alternatives?
Femnec on mobile, Librewolf on desktop
Cromite, Fennec
https://f-droid.org/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid
I mean, something like Lynx is probably as private as you get. Might be lacking a few features like, anything graphical. Still relatively usable imo
Is that a unique tracking link? It looks more like a regular short link. I call fake news on this one.
there's no reason to use a "short" link when it's longer than the real "long" link
Perhaps, but that does not mean it's not the case.
if i see domain.tld/garbage i have to assume they did it for tracking, not the opposite or for "shortening" it
No, that's wrong. All url shorteners work exactly like that. How did you get the initial link anyway?
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=clickfor maximum tracking analysisEdit: 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
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.
Yes, Firefox detected that I shared to Whatsapp, then added the second link at the end of my message. I was pissed
"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.
I like the duckduckgo browser