1951242 - Copy Clean Link Disabled/Greyed Out on tracking parameters in text fragments

Status: NEW

(Core :: Privacy: Anti-Tracking, defect, P3)

Description

[Navneeth]

Attachment: Screenshot 2025-03-01 210151.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:135.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/135.0

Steps to reproduce:

Right-click on a link with a lot of tracking parameters expecting to copy a cleaner version of the link without the parameters. (If it helps, this was Discord web.)

Link: https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-economics/retail-investors-sensex-fall-9862754/#amp_tf=From%20%1%24s&aoh=17408398209744&csi=0&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&ampshare=https%3A%2F%2Findianexpress.com%2Farticle%2Fexplained%2Fexplained-economics%2Fretail-investors-sensex-fall-9862754%2F

Actual results:

'Copy clean link' context menu item was greyed out.

Expected results:

'Copy Clean link' should have been available.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The bug has a release status flag that shows some version of Firefox is affected, thus it will be considered confirmed.

Comment 2

[William Wen (:wwen)]

Hi, thanks for filing this bug!

The reason the "parameters" in the URL are not being stripped is because the "parameter" in your link is actually not a parameter but a different part of the URL because it is after a # (see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_development/Howto/Web_mechanics/What_is_a_URL#basics_anatomy_of_a_url for details).

We don't yet support stripping this part of the URL because it cannot be used (or at least is much less useful) for tracking purposes. We recognize that sometimes the user may still want this part of the URL removed for purposes other than privacy protection but extending Copy Clean Link to do this is in the backlog for now.

Comment 3

[Manuel Bucher [:manuel] {{ fyi: PTO Dec 20 - Jan 4 }}]

it cannot be used (or at least is much less useful) for tracking purposes

Note that from the looks of the url in comment 0 the fragment definitly seems to be used for tracking purposes here. The paramters do look pretty much like tracking paratemters. I'm not entirely sure how they ended up in the fragment. When I click on share I get an URL that uses normal query paramter based tracking:

https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-economics/retail-investors-sensex-fall-9862754/?utm_source=whatsapp&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=WhatsappShare

It seems like the source of the link is somewhere on google, but at least it's not added by google search. I can't reconstruct where the URL is coming from.

Comment 4

[Manuel Bucher [:manuel] {{ fyi: PTO Dec 20 - Jan 4 }}]

This is not related to https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/149365. Copy Clean Link is a list based approach and when we want to add paramters to the list, bugs need to be filed as described in Bug 1920601. I've opened Bug 1951456 for the report from web-compat.

Comment 5

[Manuel Bucher [:manuel] {{ fyi: PTO Dec 20 - Jan 4 }}]

Do you know where these tracking-parameters origin? Where was this link generated? Where the tracking-parameters originally in the text fragment or was the link modified after the fact?

(note to self: one approach would be to always remove the fragment, but that also breaks some websites that put actual information in the fragment. + also breaks jumping to a specific part of the website).

Comment 6

[William Wen (:wwen)]

They do look like they were meant to be tracking parameters but since it's in the fragment portion of the URL doesn't that mean they aren't sent to the server?

Comment 7

[Manuel Bucher [:manuel] {{ fyi: PTO Dec 20 - Jan 4 }}]

They aren't send to the server, but the javascript can retrieve the fragment and send it to the server: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Location/hash (edit: updated link)

Comment 8

[William Wen (:wwen)]

Ah makes sense then

Comment 9

[Navneeth]

(In reply to Manuel Bucher [:manuel] from comment #5)

Do you know where these tracking-parameters origin? Where was this link generated? Where the tracking-parameters originally in the text fragment or was the link modified after the fact?

(note to self: one approach would be to always remove the fragment, but that also breaks some websites that put actual information in the fragment. + also breaks jumping to a specific part of the website).

I don't know how it was generated, but this is how I found it, as shown in the screenshot.

Comment 10

[Manuel Bucher [:manuel] {{ fyi: PTO Dec 20 - Jan 4 }}]

I've now encountered one website that uses text fragment for tracking. E.g. when clicking on the first suggested search: https://www.lidl.de/q/search?q=nischenregal#suggestTrackingType=suggest_searchterm.

(+ clearing needinfo, because info was provied in comment #9)