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Ask HN: A clipboard tool that strips tracker ids from URLs

7 points by hetspookjee ↗ HN
Hi, I like to share a lot of links with friends, co-workers and whomever is interested. However, I keep finding more and more tracking IDs in the URLs. To name a few are the ?si= in Spotify URLS and the ?glicd in Google urls. I'm sure there are plentimore, but I'd reckon there must exist some tool for Windows / Mac that allows the user to configure tags that need to be stripped from the URL when copying. It'll save me the hassle of doing it manually now, which is sometimes tend to forget as well.

4 comments

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jamesponddotco
I do not use macOS or Windows, so I have no idea if such an application exists for these platforms, but you may want to look into browser extensions or simply write a bash script that parses the URL, remove the tracking, and add it to your clipboard instead.

As far as browser extensions goes, I use CleanURLs[1] on Firefox, and it works as advertised, removing all sorts of crap from URLs before you even need to copy them. It also provides a JSON file with all the rules they use[2], which if you are building a bash script with, you could use to build the parsing logic.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clearurls/

[2] https://rules2.clearurls.xyz/data.minify.json

hetspookjee
Thanks! The plugin from Mozilla solves quite a bit already indeed.