Share Safely removes tracking data that social media apps and websites add to links that you share.
Tracking data records information about how and when a link was shared. Sometimes that takes the form of ’ a tracking ID, which uniquely identifies the specific instance of you sharing a link. That way, when somebody opens the link, the service hosting the thing that you’re linking to knows that somebody got the link from you. If that other person sends it to another person on the same service, even if you don’t know them, the service will know there’s some connection between you both. Facebook go even further and put tracking IDs on links to other sites when you post them on Facebook.
Money. It’s all about building profiles of people without their consent in order to sell them to advertising networks.
Say that a link to a post on a social network looks something like this:
https://example.com/username/post/12345
With a tracking ID, shown here in bold, it might look like:
https://example.com/username/post/12345?id=a1b2c3d4e5f6g7h8i
You can see a question mark followed by a bunch of gunk. The technical name for this is “URL parameters”, and they aren’t a bad thing per se — in fact they’re an essential part of how many websites work. However, in this case they’re being used to include a tracking ID. Here are a few examples of tracking IDs on links to popular services.
That last one isn’t a tracking ID, but one of several types of Google Analytics data fields that a service may add to a link to track the origin of a shared link. They all begin with utm_.
The tracking IDs that Facebook adds to outgoing links look like: