How to Stop Social Media Platforms From Tracking You When You Share Posts
When you press the share button on social media apps like Instagram, Facebook, or Threads, these sites add a tracker to the link you share. This tracker means Instagram can know who you shared the link with and likely uses that information to further optimize its algorithm for ads. Although the technology is sneaky, it is easy to remove the tracking information from these links.
It’s actually quite easy to spot a link containing trackers. To check it, copy the link to any Instagram post and paste it somewhere safe, like your Notes app. A normal Instagram link looks like this:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DVrMKVVAaBi/
The same followed link has a bunch of extra characters at the end:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DVrMKVVAaBi/?igsh=cGd5cGx4enJmcThu
Every character after that? is used to identify that your profile shared the link. Although this example highlights Instagram, the same thing happens on many other apps and websites. Facebook, Threads, Reddit, YouTube, Amazon and many others use some sort of tracking settings in links to see how people got to a certain post or page. These trackers have legitimate use cases, such as tracking affiliate links to pay commissions or tracking social media traffic.
In some cases, however, these tracking links serve no purpose other than to identify who shared the link with you and with whom you share the links. This can be used to identify people you are close to, which, in turn, helps social media giants serve targeted ads to you and your friends or relatives. It can also compromise your privacy, because someone opening your link will see that it was your account that originally shared it, even if you don’t share that link directly with them.
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How to remove tracking links
The easiest way to remove tracking links is to manually remove the URL tracker. This is quite easy to do on desktop browsers, where you have larger screens that allow you to see and remove tracking settings for long URLs. In the case of Instagram, you can safely delete the part after the ? in most URLs. The same often applies to links from other social media sites.
To automate this process on desktop, you can use the built-in Copy Clean Link feature in Firefox, as well as similar features in browsers like Brave. Simply right-click on any link and select Copy clean link to delete its tracking settings. You can also use uBlock Origin to remove URL tracking. In the extension settings, go to Filter lists and activate URL Tracking Protection. The ClearURLs extension for Firefox or Microsoft Edge was a good option here, but it hasn’t been updated in a while and it may break some links, so I recommend avoiding it.
If you have an iPhone, you can install the Anonymize Meta Sharing shortcut, which removes tracking settings from Facebook, Instagram, and Threads links. Simply copy the link, run the shortcut and it will give you a no-follow version of the same URL. If you use Android or want an alternative on iOS, there is also a simple website called URL Clean that removes link tracking. You can use it to remove certain types of tracking, but you should note that it breaks some URLs.
