Yar! This here be the Fediverse, Matey, so have a link From the link above, a Non-tracking Link to YT on Invidious: SpongeBob SquarePants Production Music (https://invidious.materialio.us/watch?v=u0XzbmRl9vM)
You left your SI in the link. It’s a tracking code Google uses to see who you’ve been talking to on other sites
I don’t know what that means exactly, but that’s good to know.
It’s the thing after ?si=
You should remove it. See, when you grab a link from youtube while logged in, Google puts the SI at the end of your link to identify the link as coming from you. It’s useless to you and me. But if I hit that link as you posted it, Google will know I clicked a link that you made. From that, Google can tell that you and I have some sort of relation (Lemmy). By getting data from everyone on who they’ve been sharing videos with, Google can do big population data and identify trends in how information is shared all over the world. That’s the kind of data that companies use to interfere in elections. Facebook got in trouble for selling this kind of data to Cambridge Analytica, who used it to influence the 2016 election in favour of Trump. When you have the big data, you can measure how tiny actions influence population beliefs. Use it to subvert democracy.
I can remove everything after the ?si= in every link i make and it will work? Is this just for google stuff? Are there other appends for other trackers i can identify and remove from my links?
Other sites have other tracking codes that they use differently, and I don’t know them as well.
