Cimbali
commented
6 years ago OK so there's 2 things going on here:
-
There's a
fbclidwhich we should remove in the initial link. You can add|fbclidat the end of "Remove from Links" in the CleanLinks preferences, and that will do the trick. I'll keep the bug open until I can add this into CleanLinks. -
The second is that the link you're being redirected to is a link shortener. It's bbc's own link shortener, but in itself it's the same as bit.ly, goo.gl and all those alternate services. The destination ("https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-45982501") I'm afraid is not available in the link, it's some form of database lookup that bbc.in does, mapping the short link to the long one.
Turns out it's a specialized link for facebook, so I'm guessing it's auto-generated by some "share to facebook" button, and pressing a "share to twitter button" would generate another
bbc.inlink that will redirect tohttps://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-45982501?ocid=socialflow_twitter&ns_source=twitter&...We could clean this at the moment the request is being done, that is bbc.in tells you "HTTP 301 redirect to page
bbc.com... ns_source=facebook", and when the browser makes that request we remove the offending parameters. However, this requires cleaning parameters from links without having redirects cleaned, so it's blocked by #27 for now.
toughdiamond
Facebook seems to have recently taken additional steps to craftily embed tracking data into external links, which CleanLinks 3.2.1 doesn't remove. For example, here's the link Facebook has for a bbc.com web page before any cleaning at all: https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fbbc.in%2F2D8dMwt%3Ffbclid%3DIwA......... [etc. etc., goes on for about 700 characters] Obviously a job for CleanLinks, so I rightclick and do "Copy clean link," which gives this: https://bbc.in/2D8dMwt?fbclid=IwAR1zDT_KSlH90LBrbPFKtdbfVVlRKo_pSPysgVVfzwif1WrILbteg-3rj8s Clearly a big improvement, well done, but there's still tracking data following the question mark that hasn't been removed. I can pretty easily delete it manually which gives me this: https://bbc.in/2D8dMwt It'd be good if the next upgrade of CleanLinks would do that itself of course, as the extra data is presumably there to track me.
But there's more. If I paste the above (seemingly clean) link into the address bar and hit go, the link turns into this: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-45982501?ocid=socialflow_facebook&ns_source=facebook&ns_mchannel=social&ns_campaign=bbcnews That's clearly not as clean as it looked. Doesn't seem like much to worry much about in terms of invading privacy, and I stand some chance of cleaning it myself by hitting the Escape key immediately after hitting go, and deleting from the right up to the question mark, to give this, which is the truly clean link I wanted from the start: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-45982501 After that I can hit go and the page opens fine. Naturally it's a cumbersome and not very reliable workaround. Like I say, the dirt seems fairly harmless anyway, but what bothers me is that Facebook now seems to have the potential to embed something more worrying than that if it ever decides to, and CleanLinks currently won't stop it. By the way, congratulations on creating an otherwise excellent link cleaner. Best I've found so far :-)