tolmasky,
@tolmasky@mastodon.social avatar

This Safari query parameter removal thing is just going to become a cat-and-mouse game, right? Google can easily start using gclid2 or even switch to using something like “a,” that you'd be less willing to indiscriminately chop off the URL. Eventually, you could even imagine a dynamic query key scheme, where you can identify it with a credit-card-style hash function. For example, if f(KEY) = (char1 + char2 + .. .+ charN) % 64 = 39, then it knows that that query key is its tracking ID.

thomasfuchs,
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

@tolmasky yes, but it would be very disruptive and provide incomplete data which will be at least to some extend unusable.

I think a better approach instead could be to not remove the parameters but stuff them with random data.

tolmasky,
@tolmasky@mastodon.social avatar

@thomasfuchs My point is that you only feel safe mutating query parameters if you know for sure that they are tracking query parameters. You wouldn't for example ever want to either remove, nor mutate, “q=". That would break search. If trackers just start using less identifiable query keys, then it becomes very difficult to do anything to them without also potentially breaking legitimate websites.

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