Link strippa

We’ve all been there. You see an interesting blog post or article on the internet, and you rush to share it with your friends. You click ‘copy’ on the link and proceed to share it with your friends. There’s just one problem.

You expect your link to look like this:

https://adstudio.spotify.com/

Instead it looks like this:

https://adstudio.spotify.com/?utm_source=us_brand_contextual_text&utm_medium=paidsearch&utm_campaign=alwayson_multi_multi_partnersolutions_adstudio_paidsearch+desktoptest_brand+contextual+text+exact+us+google&gclid=CjwKCAjwmtDpBRAQEiwAC6lm4_7JFVKXpsQEem2PITSM9hRVFSSTbZyJEhgD7kcuCyyL4ZUqn7YOXBoCPswQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds

So what happened? This is the golden rule of the internet at work:

If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product. - The Collective Will

Feel free to read 2520 words on that paraphrasing on Quora , or not. The point is, the internet has two primary ways of offering you free stuff: by monetizing your attention and your identity. Query parameters like the above serve to let the domain publisher (and plenty third party companies), know exactly why I landed on their website, from where and whence I came, and to whom to attribute the ultimate victory that is your (my friend’s) landing on that website.

Think website publishers making a living that sounds innocent? I’m with you, I want journalists and cool services to make plenty $$, because I like using them. The problem is that identity part of the equation. Query parameters tacked onto links aren’t used solely for attribution, they’re used to fingerprint and enhance online profiles of everyone in the equation. Let’s break down the original link above that mind you goes to the same exact website as the shorter link:

https://adstudio.spotify.com/?
utm_source=us_brand_contextual_text
utm_medium=paidsearch
utm_campaign=alwayson_multi_multi_partnersolutions_adstudio_paidsearch+desktoptest_brand+contextual+text+exact+us+google
gclid=CjwKCAjwmtDpBRAQEiwAC6lm4_7JFVKXpsQEem2PITSM9hRVFSSTbZyJEhgD7kcuCyyL4ZUqn7YOXBoCPswQAvD_BwE
gclsrc=aw.ds

Google conveniently breaks down the meaning of these params here, but for convenience just note that they increased the character length from 30 to 319, making requests sizes tenfold throughout the life of the link (every friend or reader), and most of all has nothing to do with your experience loading that page. Note almost every link you click or share from Facebook to Twitter to Google searches have massively bloated links that ultimately make the internet slower and your identity far less protected for the sole purpose of making third parties (rather than content-producers/publishers) more money.

Then again, maybe you don’t care about all that, and you just hate seeing 300 work links in your groupchat. In that case, head back up to LinkStrippa.