Lately I’ve noticed some mainstream sites injection tracking links into literally every link on their site.
When I hover over it, it shows the correct link at the bottom of my browser, but if I click it or copy it, it takes me to a hijacked tracker link.
Then I can’t even get the original link without having my activity tracked.
How do I get the original link that appears at the bottom of my browser?
There’s an extension for Firefox and maybe Chrome that should help. I think it’s called ClearURL, or something similar. It removes the trackers from the ends of URLs
EDIT: That’s assuming that it’s a legitimate tracking URL, and not something that’s been added by malware.
These are not tracking links in the conventional sense where they append tracking data to the legitimate link. They just hijack the link that someone else posts and replace it with an entirely new tracking link with a l.facebook.com domain.
No link cleaning software I have found works because of this.
That sounds more like malware then. Links from Twitter shouldn’t have any Facebook tracking info.
Check your browser for any extensions that you don’t recognise, and if you’re on Windows, download and run the free version of Malwarebytes.
The site itself; Facebook, Reddit, or Twitter sends you to a subdomain that then redirects you to the link you clicked. Sometimes used to check the url and warn you if it’s malicious or if it’s linking to another website, but it’s usually used for tracking as well.
try SkipRedirect, can break some things though, but rare.
Only works for hijacked links where the extension can grab the original link somehow of course.
For general Ad Links, there is FastForward, though i feel it hasnt been on the same level of maintenance since UniversalBypass closed down and they forked it.
This bit confused me. I thought OP meant that it was the same link every time. The downside of text based forums like this - it removes a lot of nuance and leaves room for misunderstanding.
That’s not what I’m saying.
So this isn’t Facebook on every occasion then, it’s related to the site you’re visiting? If so, the extension will hopefully fix it :)
No it’s not, you misread my statement. It’s regarding the type of link and not the site itself.
no, links from Twitter are instead automatically converted to a t.co URL.
I don’t have an extention on FF but whenever I copy a link there’s an option to also copy clean link. I’m not home, but I believe this is associated with my search engine being SearXNG.
This is actually a rather new feature in the firefox browser unrelated to searx.
Is that feature default for vanilla firefox? Or do you need to go fiddle in settings to turn that on
Vanilla.
The only reason I didn’t mention it is because it’s for copying links, whereas the extension should do it while opening, without needing to copy it first.
Thats a level of convenience that will probably get me to grab the extension, but Im glad firefox has that as a feature anyway