Chrome 64 Now Trims Messy Links When You Share Them (theverge.com) 87
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.
that's fantastic (Score:4, Interesting)
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Agreed, now you can let Google set yet another precedent for how your life is run for you and others by Big Data.
captcha: spyglass
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How dare Google do something to cut down on the amount of tracking information sent in plaintext in the URL when you copy it and send it to others! Don't they know that you love being tracked and having referring pages that reveal where you were browsing being spread to everyone!
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They don't want to share,
Their Precious...
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This is just Google's way of telling everyone else to get out of their business. Tracking is for Google only, not for the rest of the plebs.
Re: that's fantastic (Score:1)
It only shows you a truncated link (Score:2, Informative)
It does not delete the tracking information, it just doesn't show it to you so you don't know its there or not.
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Too many people are confusing this with a good thing. This is to help block your knowledge of tracking.
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but..... how long until google replaces referral identifiers with their own to profit from the 'cleaned' links, or removes identifying bits belonging to competitors of its analytics service?
this belongs as an extension, a configurable extension. not built-in to the browser with no control over it.
sloppy seconds, manicured (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
Also ironic that Google cleaning up their own mess (Score:5, Insightful)
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)?
Re:Also ironic that Google cleaning up their own m (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: ... they're not trying to shorten jack shit. There's no real benefit to the user.
https://www.google.com/url?q=h... [google.com]
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.
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Makes tracking more accurate (Score:3)
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.
Because replacing a URL is a great idea (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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FTFY
Re:Because replacing a URL is a great idea (Score:5, Informative)
https://stackoverflow.com/ques... [stackoverflow.com]
There's loads of javascipt that already changes copied text, prepending or appending anything you want. And also copying to the clipboard, usually just to share a link, onclick it automatically writes to the clipboard. This library handles writing to the clipboard for you if you need such a thing https://clipboardjs.com/ [clipboardjs.com]
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It won't be random unless it's being done as a prank.
Best guess is that they have some universal rules (e.g. remove utm_* GET params) and some specialized URL-rewriters by domain for well-known/popular sites (article shows amazon.com as an example).
How? (Score:1)
From the Android Police image [androidpolice.com], I see they've completely changed the URL even before the ?. Do they have a database of rules for this? I can't see how else it would work.
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I assume they are using the tag to find the basic URL. I could be wrong.
Sorry, but I'm pretty sure you're wrong.
Look at the image shared by the AC to which you replied. It took a link that would have been shared as something like:
https://www.amazon.com/s/browse/ref=br_msw_pdt-1?_encoding... etc etc lots of kruft etc etc ...
And turned it into :
https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=15569942001
Nowhere in the first link is the relative page "b". AFAICT, they've added some smarts to map to what they know it can go to.
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Attack on small-data (Score:3)
Except for Google themselves (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.
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Yep, full-out anti-competitive behavior.
Time for a new Microsoft vs. United States, only this time with Google.
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What sane user copies a link from an ad?
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Bad Ads (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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We discussed this last week. It doesn't just protect Google AdSense but rather blocks ads that don't meet a code of conduct which AdSense happens to abide by. This isn't a money grab, it's cleaning up the internet in the hope that users scale back ad blocking this ensuring internet ad companies don't go out of business.
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by "ad companies" you mean Alphabet. Remember, most of the legitimate ad companies are owned by Alphabet. The ones that don't typically are the ones that serve ads for torrent sites, porn sit
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More Chrome nonsense. Don't use it, don't want it and never recommend it.
More data going to Google, more walled garden.
No Thanks.
Slashvertisment (Score:1)
What's the deal with all the browser Slashvertisements over the last year?
"Chrome has new feature"
"Firefox has impoved its privacy-related features (yeah right)"
"IE made some performance improvements"
If Slashdot were still run by the original owners, you'd see stories about browsers that are way better - you know, with the basic fundamental feature of not being made to intetionally track you, unlike these three.
Palemoon
http://www.palemoon.org/ [palemoon.org]
Waterfox
https://www.waterfoxproject.or... [waterfoxproject.org]
Re: How about AMP links? (Score:2)
and especially not an https://m/ [m] link
but at least when you have to delete the m, you donâ(TM)t mind so much that ipads cant select the s in https.
Re: How about AMP links? (Score:2)
or that slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support ipad âoekeyboardsâ
Re: How about AMP links? (Score:1)
Is that punctuation bug a dog whistle to your fellow iGadget users?
There is an easy fix. Turn off jiffy-quotes (or whatever trademark Apple is using to refer to them now).
Re: How about AMP links? (Score:2)
easier fix is just not post anything on slashdot in the first place, and if you do keep it to no more than one line.
There Better be a Work-Around or Opt-Out for this. (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
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You mean like a Google URL?
h++ps://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=63iLWqKmJMKmjwPMqouwBA&q=pineapples&oq=pineapples&gs_l=psy-ab.3...0.0.0.6378.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0..0.0....0...1c..64.psy-ab..0.0.0....0.n3CzS30gTZ0
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Agreed. I may be accepting of there being a "copy raw url" from the context menu, but would prefer a copy to behave as always with a "copy simplified url" from the context menu.
With respect to safely trimming, google has a done a lot of work on determining the canonical form of a URL to limit redundant search results. I'll bet that it uses patterns in the URL only partially, while it uses the results rendered for their crawlers for various forms of the URL to determine the insignificant parameters.
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Copy and paste works as expected. This affects the Share buttons only.
The important question is how. (Score:3)
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 ;)
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Don't worry. The servers will also make sure that any link you do share has sufficient diversity and does not contain any content Google deems inappropriate. Here, see this link from Fox news:
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The downside of this is that (obviously?) they will now be tracking every single URL that you copy.
If you are using Chrome you presumably were already okay with this?
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The absurd thing here is that you think they don't do this already.
Anyone else sick of this (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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Regulations?! Getcher big-ass gubmint out of mah computer! Free markit!
The Verge is garbage (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Awaiting arrival of second shoe (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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If you'd said that ten years ago, I'd have bought it - but, since that time, Google has proven it doesn't really know how to develop and sustain any sort of strategy outside of its core advertising group.
"Facebook" might be a better bet to own the internet in 20 years, though.
May trigger cat-and-mouse game (Score:2)
Co's will just start putting tracking data in other parts of the URL, such as:
www.foo.com/tracking-crap1234/page-x.com
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Sites already do this. Ex:
https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/is-it-ok-to-secretly-record-your-visit-with-your-doctor-1.3810373
The token doesn't necessarily fall at the end of a link. BBC for example knows when you click on sections:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-43120277
Then you have more fun with links like
https://www.ctvnews.ca/polopoly_fs/1.3810385.1519089406!/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_300/image.jpg
The tracking is part of the path not query string.
But what if... (Score:2)
...it's a link to a Getty Image?
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Better suited for a plugin (Score:2)
Altering the way a basic copy+paste function works is really not something I want, even if good intentioned. Why not just create a plugin that users can opt-in to instead? I rarely use Chrome (Pale Moon user here) but what they're doing sows a bit more distrust in them for me personally.