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While I greatly value my privacy to the point where I donate to noyb.eu, removing utm campaign tags feels too much. Those do not commonly contain private inform

While I greatly value my privacy to the point where I donate to noyb.eu, removing utm campaign tags feels too much. Those do not commonly contain private information. I believe that marketers should feel free to use those to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns, instead of relying on more privacy-intrusive and opaque methods (e.g. cookies, fingerprinting, IP address collecting, etc.).

axiosgunnar 5y ago
I agree, and I wonder if over the long term, an economy where no tracking is possible might not perform as well as an economy that tracks everything, for knowledge means better resource allocation. (and then the tracking economy, let’s say China for example, will just steamroll our economies. This is what I‘m worried about, in a vacuum a slower developing but ad/tracking-free society would be preferable of course.) Of course I despise all ads as much as the next hacker here on HN, I just wonder sometimes if they‘re a necessary evil. So in the end I‘m inclined to agree with your nuanced „some general statistical gathering is OK, just no fingerprinting etc“.
- jxf 5y ago
  > an economy where no tracking is possible might not perform as well as an economy that tracks everything, for knowledge means better resource allocation. Such an economy is still very possible: just pay people for their data. Giving it away isn't economically efficient and imposes significant negative externalities, as we've seen.
- bigfudge 5y ago
  I'm not disagreeing with the possibility, but this seems like a speculation on a possible risk. I can think of lots of reasons why this might not happen too... but the privacy invasion is happening now and is a direct threat to our public life. I think we should focus on the most pressing problem first.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  > an economy where no tracking is possible might not perform as well as an economy that tracks everything Oh well. Just let the economy perform slightly worse then. > for knowledge means better resource allocation Who cares about some corporation's resource allocation? That's their problem to solve. We should be caring about all the people whose privacy they are violating instead. If they want to allocate resources efficiently, they should be required to do it in a way that doesn't invade anyone's privacy. If that means they'll make less money so be it.
maple3142 5y ago
I usually removes those parameters manually when I want to share the url to my friends, so it is quite useful for me.
- StavrosK 5y ago
  Interesting how we wouldn't really mind the parameters if sites took the time to clean up after themselves instead of leaving them in the URL.
  - teachingassist 5y ago
    The fact that they are in the URL serves an additional purpose for these sites - to identify who is sharing exactly what, and with whom. (I've noticed that TikTok does this explicitly, providing a different short URL for each share request - it's clean, which makes them easier to share without blocking out a whole chat, but still not wanted) It's not that I don't mind the parameters, it's that I also mind the URL tracking. And I can do something directly about the URL tracking.
    - judge2020 5y ago
      I doubt that’s the case - if you come from Twitter, you sharing the same link with 100 people probably skews their data. I just don’t think it’s that big of a problem yet for marketers to ask their devs to remove utm parameters after they’re logged.
      - Hello71 5y ago
        it skews the data in the right direction (from their point of view). if you saw it on twitter, and shared it with 100 people, then (from their perspective) they should spend more time advertising on twitter.
- dlowe-net 5y ago
  I use the Linksnip chrome extension for that. It also shortens the url for a small number of sites.
selfhoster11 5y ago
UTM tags are unsightly. I always strip everything but the core part of a URL before sharing.
- spurgu 5y ago
  Me too, although it's a pain to do on mobile and especially so on iOS.
bottled_poe 5y ago
Nah, the industry started a war on consumers. That’s what they are getting.
- samcheng 5y ago
  As someone who is (sometimes militantly) pro-customer, I don't think tracking parameters are "war" - they are just a tool used to understand visitor flow, and ideally improve the visitor experience. They are fundamentally first-party analytics - they show up in the server logs of the site visited, and that site needed to craft the link in order to place the parameters in the first place. There's a big difference between URL parameters and e.g. cookies attached to third-party javascript. I definitely support the freedom of people to remove these URL parameters if they want. But it's not fair to classify them as a "war" - they are a tool used by scrupulous marketers, too.
  - VortexDream 5y ago
    I think the problem is that it's not possible for end users to know what's happening with the tracked data. Is the company on the other end creating a shadow profile of every single user (like Facebook)? Are they selling the data to companies that do user profiling? No idea. Who am I supposed to trust? Even if there are scrupulous entities, the harm caused by the unscrupulous ones overshadows them.
    - sagarm 5y ago
      Companies can only log information about your interaction with their sites. With very few exceptions, that just means on whatevercompany.com. Basically, they only have the data you explicitly give them. In the case of some large sites that provide pervasive services like FB, Twitter, and Google, you interact with their sites incidentally as you surf in the internet. It's these sites that are a potential privacy risk IMO.
- slver 5y ago
  How is campaign tracking a "war on consumers"
cyborgx7 5y ago
Every time any kind of measure to improve people's browsing experience is posted here someone comes along and explains how this one is too much. But they are always wrong. There is no "going too far" in optimizing the browser for the people who are using it.
rplnt 5y ago
That's not the only issue. The ids are then fed back into the facebook. Facebook can use it to link contacts together. I get a share link, it gives it an ID, I send it to someone, they open it and now they have linked my account with their account. Same works if I click on a page and get the ID, share just that page, and someone clicks it (and there's some fb element on the page). Now if several users a day share a link here on HN, facebook will know about us as belonging to a certain group.
- lmkg 5y ago
  The GP mentioned UTMs specifically, which are coarse-grained. Generally all links in a campaign will share the same UTM parameters. Sometimes different sizes or A/B variants will have distinguishing values. But as a matter of course, these are not unique to the user. Their primary purpose is to aggregate data, not to distinguish it. This is different than the type of tracking you're talking about. ID-type parameters like gclid, dclid, and fbclid are all unique to the ad impression, and tied to the individual that ad was served to. Which means they can tie it back to other data sources they have about the individual. Like social graph data for Facebook, or demographic or interests data for other advertiser networks. Personally I care about ID parameters a lot, and UTM-type parameters not at all. But that's just me.
throwaway81523 5y ago
I always remove them. They're like referer headers. Where the visitor came from is just like any other info that might be useful to the site operator, but is really not any of their business unless the visitor voluntarily discloses it.
theshrike79 5y ago
The issue is this: https://aliexpress.com/item/4000336900709.html?spm=a2g01.12617084.fdpcl001.8.2665mpnYmpnYMH&gps-id=5547572&scm=1007.19201.130907.0&scm_id=1007.19201.130907.0&scm-url=1007.19201.130907.0&pvid=65430901-7ec6-4584-a620-4618974e03ae https://aliexpress.com/item/4000336900709.html?spm=a2g01.126... vs https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000336900709.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000336900709.html Both take you to the same page. URLs, especially when clicked from ads tend to have a HUGE amount of extra crap that's in no way needed for any kind of functionality.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  This is a case where using HN's "code" feature can help The first link is: https://aliexpress.com/item/4000336900709.html?spm=a2g01.12617084.fdpcl001.8.2665mpnYmpnYMH&gps-id=5547572&scm=1007.19201.130907.0&scm_id=1007.19201.130907.0&scm-url=1007.19201.130907.0&pvid=65430901-7ec6-4584-a620-4618974e03ae The second: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000336900709.html (HN normally truncates links to ... 60 characters, it seems.
- grishka 5y ago
  If you've clicked an ad, you've already lost to marketers. If you've seen one, you've lost too.
  - theshrike79 5y ago
    _I_ know how to remove the crap when sharing the link. Other people don't. This is why we need extensions like this. It's not fun to get a 2048 character long URL to a product linked to me on mobile, where it literally doesn't fit on the screen all at once. =)
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    Indeed. We should just block all marketing, absolutely no exceptions. Drive their return on investment as close to zero as humanly possible.
- scottmcleod 5y ago
  Its not "crap" its literally the same parameters to understand where the traffic comes from.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
> I believe that marketers should feel free to use those to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns I don't. I believe marketers should have exactly zero ways to measure the effectiveness of their mind hacking efforts. Any data they try and collect should have negative value by virtue of being completely randomized by the browser. Actually I believe marketers shouldn't even exist. Nothing they say is trustworthy by virtue of conflict of interest. The internet would be much better off without these constant attempts to subvert it for their purposes.
- sdevonoes 5y ago
  I agree. I don't think marketers are trustworthy: their sole purpose is to "hack" my mind in order to buy stuff, so sure it's a job someone has to do but if I can avoid marketers to get more data from me, I'm in.
- scottmcleod 5y ago
  Youre a troll. Where do you work? Bet you wouldn't have a job without marketers...
  - kroltan 5y ago
    Ad hominem and inconsequential, just because one is benefited by the existence of marketers does not mean they have to approve of their existence.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- HDMI_Cable 5y ago
  That can be simplified even further: If their incentives don't align with mine at least tangentially, then I'm not using their product. Out goes marketers, social media, and most ads.
- myfavoritedog 5y ago
DangerousPie 5y ago
I don't mind people stripping these tags manually for link sharing, but stripping them across the board would be a major issue for website that finance themselves through affiliate links. Suddenly your referrals are no longer tracked and your main source of revenue dies up.
- thrwaeasddsaf 5y ago
  > I don't mind people stripping these tags manually for link sharing, but stripping them across the board would be a major issue for website that finance themselves through affiliate links. Good riddance. Affiliate schemes just encourage people to spam low quality content full of affiliate links to products that are rarely good.
reaperducer 5y ago
A utm tag isn't the only way to measure the effectiveness of marketing. It's just the laziest way. And once the adtech companies notice that every tag except utm is being stripped, you can bet that utms will start being stuffed with tracking.
- sagarm 5y ago
  If link stripping becomes common, links will start becoming unique. This performance information is just too important to running a business.

axiosgunnar 5y ago

I agree, and I wonder if over the long term, an economy where no tracking is possible might not perform as well as an economy that tracks everything, for knowledge means better resource allocation. (and then the tracking economy, let’s say China for example, will just steamroll our economies. This is what I‘m worried about, in a vacuum a slower developing but ad/tracking-free society would be preferable of course.) Of course I despise all ads as much as the next hacker here on HN, I just wonder sometimes if they‘re a necessary evil. So in the end I‘m inclined to agree with your nuanced „some general statistical gathering is OK, just no fingerprinting etc“.

jxf 5y ago
> an economy where no tracking is possible might not perform as well as an economy that tracks everything, for knowledge means better resource allocation. Such an economy is still very possible: just pay people for their data. Giving it away isn't economically efficient and imposes significant negative externalities, as we've seen.
bigfudge 5y ago
I'm not disagreeing with the possibility, but this seems like a speculation on a possible risk. I can think of lots of reasons why this might not happen too... but the privacy invasion is happening now and is a direct threat to our public life. I think we should focus on the most pressing problem first.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
> an economy where no tracking is possible might not perform as well as an economy that tracks everything Oh well. Just let the economy perform slightly worse then. > for knowledge means better resource allocation Who cares about some corporation's resource allocation? That's their problem to solve. We should be caring about all the people whose privacy they are violating instead. If they want to allocate resources efficiently, they should be required to do it in a way that doesn't invade anyone's privacy. If that means they'll make less money so be it.

maple3142 5y ago

I usually removes those parameters manually when I want to share the url to my friends, so it is quite useful for me.

StavrosK 5y ago
Interesting how we wouldn't really mind the parameters if sites took the time to clean up after themselves instead of leaving them in the URL.
- teachingassist 5y ago
  The fact that they are in the URL serves an additional purpose for these sites - to identify who is sharing exactly what, and with whom. (I've noticed that TikTok does this explicitly, providing a different short URL for each share request - it's clean, which makes them easier to share without blocking out a whole chat, but still not wanted) It's not that I don't mind the parameters, it's that I also mind the URL tracking. And I can do something directly about the URL tracking.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    I doubt that’s the case - if you come from Twitter, you sharing the same link with 100 people probably skews their data. I just don’t think it’s that big of a problem yet for marketers to ask their devs to remove utm parameters after they’re logged.
    - Hello71 5y ago
      it skews the data in the right direction (from their point of view). if you saw it on twitter, and shared it with 100 people, then (from their perspective) they should spend more time advertising on twitter.
dlowe-net 5y ago
I use the Linksnip chrome extension for that. It also shortens the url for a small number of sites.

selfhoster11 5y ago

UTM tags are unsightly. I always strip everything but the core part of a URL before sharing.

spurgu 5y ago
Me too, although it's a pain to do on mobile and especially so on iOS.

bottled_poe 5y ago

Nah, the industry started a war on consumers. That’s what they are getting.

samcheng 5y ago
As someone who is (sometimes militantly) pro-customer, I don't think tracking parameters are "war" - they are just a tool used to understand visitor flow, and ideally improve the visitor experience. They are fundamentally first-party analytics - they show up in the server logs of the site visited, and that site needed to craft the link in order to place the parameters in the first place. There's a big difference between URL parameters and e.g. cookies attached to third-party javascript. I definitely support the freedom of people to remove these URL parameters if they want. But it's not fair to classify them as a "war" - they are a tool used by scrupulous marketers, too.
- VortexDream 5y ago
  I think the problem is that it's not possible for end users to know what's happening with the tracked data. Is the company on the other end creating a shadow profile of every single user (like Facebook)? Are they selling the data to companies that do user profiling? No idea. Who am I supposed to trust? Even if there are scrupulous entities, the harm caused by the unscrupulous ones overshadows them.
  - sagarm 5y ago
    Companies can only log information about your interaction with their sites. With very few exceptions, that just means on whatevercompany.com. Basically, they only have the data you explicitly give them. In the case of some large sites that provide pervasive services like FB, Twitter, and Google, you interact with their sites incidentally as you surf in the internet. It's these sites that are a potential privacy risk IMO.
slver 5y ago
How is campaign tracking a "war on consumers"

cyborgx7 5y ago

Every time any kind of measure to improve people's browsing experience is posted here someone comes along and explains how this one is too much. But they are always wrong. There is no "going too far" in optimizing the browser for the people who are using it.

rplnt 5y ago

That's not the only issue. The ids are then fed back into the facebook. Facebook can use it to link contacts together. I get a share link, it gives it an ID, I send it to someone, they open it and now they have linked my account with their account. Same works if I click on a page and get the ID, share just that page, and someone clicks it (and there's some fb element on the page). Now if several users a day share a link here on HN, facebook will know about us as belonging to a certain group.

lmkg 5y ago
The GP mentioned UTMs specifically, which are coarse-grained. Generally all links in a campaign will share the same UTM parameters. Sometimes different sizes or A/B variants will have distinguishing values. But as a matter of course, these are not unique to the user. Their primary purpose is to aggregate data, not to distinguish it. This is different than the type of tracking you're talking about. ID-type parameters like gclid, dclid, and fbclid are all unique to the ad impression, and tied to the individual that ad was served to. Which means they can tie it back to other data sources they have about the individual. Like social graph data for Facebook, or demographic or interests data for other advertiser networks. Personally I care about ID parameters a lot, and UTM-type parameters not at all. But that's just me.

throwaway81523 5y ago

I always remove them. They're like referer headers. Where the visitor came from is just like any other info that might be useful to the site operator, but is really not any of their business unless the visitor voluntarily discloses it.

theshrike79 5y ago

The issue is this: https://aliexpress.com/item/4000336900709.html?spm=a2g01.12617084.fdpcl001.8.2665mpnYmpnYMH&gps-id=5547572&scm=1007.19201.130907.0&scm_id=1007.19201.130907.0&scm-url=1007.19201.130907.0&pvid=65430901-7ec6-4584-a620-4618974e03ae https://aliexpress.com/item/4000336900709.html?spm=a2g01.126... vs https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000336900709.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000336900709.html Both take you to the same page. URLs, especially when clicked from ads tend to have a HUGE amount of extra crap that's in no way needed for any kind of functionality.

dredmorbius 5y ago
This is a case where using HN's "code" feature can help The first link is: https://aliexpress.com/item/4000336900709.html?spm=a2g01.12617084.fdpcl001.8.2665mpnYmpnYMH&gps-id=5547572&scm=1007.19201.130907.0&scm_id=1007.19201.130907.0&scm-url=1007.19201.130907.0&pvid=65430901-7ec6-4584-a620-4618974e03ae The second: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000336900709.html (HN normally truncates links to ... 60 characters, it seems.
grishka 5y ago
If you've clicked an ad, you've already lost to marketers. If you've seen one, you've lost too.
- theshrike79 5y ago
  _I_ know how to remove the crap when sharing the link. Other people don't. This is why we need extensions like this. It's not fun to get a 2048 character long URL to a product linked to me on mobile, where it literally doesn't fit on the screen all at once. =)
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Indeed. We should just block all marketing, absolutely no exceptions. Drive their return on investment as close to zero as humanly possible.
scottmcleod 5y ago
Its not "crap" its literally the same parameters to understand where the traffic comes from.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

> I believe that marketers should feel free to use those to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns I don't. I believe marketers should have exactly zero ways to measure the effectiveness of their mind hacking efforts. Any data they try and collect should have negative value by virtue of being completely randomized by the browser. Actually I believe marketers shouldn't even exist. Nothing they say is trustworthy by virtue of conflict of interest. The internet would be much better off without these constant attempts to subvert it for their purposes.

sdevonoes 5y ago
I agree. I don't think marketers are trustworthy: their sole purpose is to "hack" my mind in order to buy stuff, so sure it's a job someone has to do but if I can avoid marketers to get more data from me, I'm in.
scottmcleod 5y ago
Youre a troll. Where do you work? Bet you wouldn't have a job without marketers...
- kroltan 5y ago
  Ad hominem and inconsequential, just because one is benefited by the existence of marketers does not mean they have to approve of their existence.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
HDMI_Cable 5y ago
That can be simplified even further: If their incentives don't align with mine at least tangentially, then I'm not using their product. Out goes marketers, social media, and most ads.
myfavoritedog 5y ago

DangerousPie 5y ago

I don't mind people stripping these tags manually for link sharing, but stripping them across the board would be a major issue for website that finance themselves through affiliate links. Suddenly your referrals are no longer tracked and your main source of revenue dies up.

thrwaeasddsaf 5y ago
> I don't mind people stripping these tags manually for link sharing, but stripping them across the board would be a major issue for website that finance themselves through affiliate links. Good riddance. Affiliate schemes just encourage people to spam low quality content full of affiliate links to products that are rarely good.

reaperducer 5y ago

A utm tag isn't the only way to measure the effectiveness of marketing. It's just the laziest way. And once the adtech companies notice that every tag except utm is being stripped, you can bet that utms will start being stuffed with tracking.

sagarm 5y ago
If link stripping becomes common, links will start becoming unique. This performance information is just too important to running a business.