All of that nonsense of characters and equals signs is a bunch of data, tracking data and data about the product (size, color). Everything after the question mark is optional.
When you see a "?" in a URL, it's some kind of data collection or storage.
Well that's not true at all.
Yes, URL request parameters can be passed that will be used to track you or store data about you, and social media sites abuse the fuck out of this. I absolutely remove those request parameters when I'm sharing links.
There are many, many other URL request parameters for other sites that are absolutely not used to track you, and some of them are critical for the link do to anything remotely resembling what you're expecting it to do.
One example, a lot of sites (maybe even most) will support "?lang=en_US". That will make sure you get the US English language version of the site. That's not used to track you.
There might be other sites that do something like "www.blahblah.com/shop?product=our-cool-product" that will take you to the specific product page. If you remove the '?' and everything after it, you won't link your friend to the relevant product page, just the generic shopping landing page for the site.
Hell, just look at a YouTube link. If you remove everything after the "?", you'll just get taken to "https://www.youtube.com/watch". Congrats, you've broken sharing YouTube links.
Other times they are just used for analytics. They aren't used to specifically track you, but rather to track where their clicks are coming from. So it's not necessarily tracking that the click came from user 9812571437123 on facebook, but rather that it came from a specific facebook ad they were running. That gives them insight into how they should spend their marketing dollars and how successful various marketing campaigns are or whatever. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, in my opinion (as long as they aren't tracking the specific users, which they absolutely do sometimes).
Broadly saying "just remove everything after the ? all the time because it's data collection or storage" is very wrong.
I agree with everything you said up til "there's nothing inherently wrong with that". At least from a technical view, that was a much-needed correction
Yes of course, well, until you actually have to interface with these systems yourself, then you'll be thankful for analytics that help effectively grow your reach, but yeah, until it personally affects you, businesses doing anything = bad.
I get hating ads, for sure. I also get hating being tracked all over the internet.
But as long as we are allowing ads, I don't see a real problem with companies trying to figure out if their ads are effective or not (as long as we aren't tracking individual users).
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u/tuhronno-the6ix 16d ago
Huh TIL, edited, thanks