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Good Friends Don't Give Their Friend's Info to Corporations

Posted January 18th, 2026

Yall remember when spotify released Spotify Messaging to their app and people were surprised there was already auto messages with songs that they've sent to their friends before? As the post mentioned, it's due to unique tracker URL's, in spotify's case, it ends with ?si=[numbers and letters , typically 16 of them] . For a total of 19 characters in a URL that do nothing but track who you send items to and who opens them up.

They aren't the only place to do so, I'm sure you can think of a dozen advertising opportunites that would want to know who ends up clicking on their links -- but they also appear for a lot of services you likely probably use!

Youtube being one of them.

Don't act like you haven't clicked on a youtube link you got through IRC, Matrix, discord, or your coworkers. It's unfortunately very pervasive as a long term video site, with the only competitors being sites like vimeo for videos or twitch if you only watch streams. Unfortunately, for the past few years, anytime you share a video (don't click this! The same link without the tracking will show up in a sec) ( i.e https://youtu.be/JiOc0r31-Os?si=sE3555-1aeQsjsgu ). it takes a note and can link who sent it with who opened it. As far as I can tell, this forum is the best i can find for timing on this, which dates this at around december 12th of 2023. This "?si=[usually 16 characters of randomness]" is appended to the link when you click the 'share' button on a video.

So, how do you get rid of it? As you can imagine, it's super easy to take this off if you're on desktop: just delete the last 19 characters starting with that "?" or grab the URL in the top of the browser since that usually doesn't have that tracking. However, when sharing on mobile, it can be a bit trickier -- especially on messages on iOS (boo). Links tend to embed to show the title and thumbnail, leaving the actual URL unable to be modified. However, as someone who wants to give these mega corps as little info as possible, I really think it's your duty to copy the link and just paste it in your notes or somewhere else without automatic embeds, and manually delete from there. Thus, you're left with your youtube video (i.e https://youtu.be/JiOc0r31-Os ) (you may click this one).

Any place and any site at any time can do this with their links, so I don't want to give a definitive link list -- but here are some key ones to look out for:

• Spotify
• Youtube
• Meta products (instagram, facebook)
• Amazon
• Reddit

Reddit is pretty tricky -- on mobile it will send a short link, like https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/-s/9kPBuDCOLa , and when you open it in your browser, it will expand to a full link with a tracker. it is best to just screenshot posts if you're on mobile AND on the app, or to just use a browser and not the reddit app, where then you can post a full link without the ?/ bits such as https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/-comments/1llidsc/did-reddit-just-implement-url-shortener-like/

Similarly, you can just copy the url above instead of pressing 'share' if on a browser on desktop. Any website that gives out url shorteners tend to hide that ?si info in the shortener, so do be careful with that.

Common Places that don't have ID links:

• qobuz
• Tumblr
• Bluesky
And of course, small scale websites. Explore in neocites or webrings!

Another thing I wanna bring up is contacts. STOP allowing apps to get contact access! They are doing this to farm infomation and make ideas of who knows who, especially if they ever sell this information ! Just. Don't Do it. Please. Good Friends don't Give their Friend's info to Corporations.

When they ask to check your contacts, they get to go through the information of everyone there, and see if any phone numbers or emails are in their site and associated with a profile. That also means they know who is connected to you, and even now contact info of people who aren't in their site -- and if they decide to keep that information (Did you read their privacy policy?), you just gave that app or corporation a lot more info than they ever needed. Not only that, but you are giving away people's contact information without their consent. It's honestly very insidious in my opinion, so just do you and those around you a favor and never share your contacts, okay?