YSK sharing a YouTube video could be revealing your identity

YSK PieFed automatically strips that out.

Edit: posts only, not in comments.

Pipepipe does not include this tracking, by default.

Always remove those search parameters before pasting links, even to my friends. F—k these big tech platforms, I'm not giving you any sharing data!

The frequency with which I've seen the si attribute included in youtube links has made me painfully aware of just how many people are not using the internet the same way I do; they're experiencing the internet through a handful of mobile apps, not through a web browser on the desktop.

I remember telling this to people on reddit and getting downvoted to oblivion while redditors squawked "who tf cares bro"

On android, urlcheck is a great app to modify URLs before sharing or opening. For this problem, you can use the json editor, and add the following two entries with small a regex I wrote:

  "shorten Youtube": {
    "regex": "^https?:\/\/(?:[a-z0-9-]+\\.)*?youtube\\.com\/(.*)&.*",
    "replacement": [
      "https:\/\/youtube.com\/$1"
    ],
    "enabled": true
  },
  "shorten Youtu.be": {
    "regex": "^https?:\/\/(?:[a-z0-9-]+\\.)*?youtu\\.be\/([^?]*)?.*",
    "replacement": [
      "https:\/\/youtube.com\/watch?v=$1"
    ],
    "enabled": true
  },

A button to shorten the link appears in urkcheck when the pattern matches. You can all auto shorten them by replacing "enabled": true
With
"automatic": true

til people don't reflexively strip out everything after the ? unless you know exactly what it's doing

It would be great if link cleaning and auto-mirroring was part of the lemmy UI itself.

Additional PSA: TikTok does the same. Also Instagram, but in my experience it doesn't reveal the sharing user (yet).

It should be common practice if you commonly share links. Try removing the query string (everything after and including the question mark). See if you get to the same page. If you do, don’t use the query string.

Query string parameters are rather often used for tracking. Look for gclid parameters after you click a google ad, for example.

I just share the URL from the browser.

Even on mobile: I don't use the YouTube app. On Android, this is a no-brainer, since you can run Firefox and uBlock Origin and bypass all the ads. On iOS it is a bit more dicey, but still advantageous to forego the app. Currently DuckDuckGo can bypass the ads for free. If you don't mind paying, Wipr2 can also do it, in Safari. Then you just put a web shortcut to YouTube and bam, ad-free YouTube. Shitty icon though (it's the regular icon in a white squircle). Either way, share from the browser, not YouTube.

Also, of course you can remove all the extra shit from the URL if you know how. That wisdom is lost on younger generations, but innate to older ones (who grew up around tech, like Millennials; or younger Gen X who adopted it at a young age — not like these iPad babies you have now).

Here's another. If the video you want to share is on youtube, it's also on invidious. Without ads, downloadable and just generally none of youtube's bullshit. It even uses the same video vURL address.

On my forum, youtube links get stripped of any extra url parameters. Every site should have to do that.

Since 4 March 2026 I am seeing "is=" in some YouTube links instead of "si=", also with the 16 character ID.

Facebook and Instagram do the same btw. Just FYI.

Not sure if my anxiety is justified here, but I am not tech savvy whatsoever. And I worry about all the things I’m doing that’s probably completely giving myself away that I’m just unaware of. I didn’t know about this at all.

You should also known that TikTok does this by default and the generated code is impossible to remove afaik, it's part of the video identifier.

So when sharing a tiktok video always download it and share the file.

Done. Thank you.

I never knew users could get the profile from it, I always thought that was a youtube internal thing. thats not cool

Get YouTube Sharing URL sans Sharing / Tracking Code (for iOS users)

If it helps, for Androids share YT link to something like Untracker to remove unwanted nonsense from the url which you can then pass on safely (also works for things such as Amazon links).

For images, share to something such as Imagepipe first to remove location data. Other apps such as Aves Libre gallery or image Toolbox also strip this data but Imagepipe is simple - share image to it & it passes the image directly to your messaging app after stripping the data

FYI on desktop you can right click on the video and select "Copy video URL", it doesn't include the tracker string. Wish they'd let us remove it from the Share button, I've simply removed that button with uBlock Origin.

It's also missing from my patched YouTube app's Share on Android, not sure if that's one of the patches.

Might not solve everything, but a good link cleaner utility is helpful too. I personally use this one: Trackless Links

I use this on Android to sanitise links I sent out as well as clean incoming links before viewing them.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.svenjacobs.app.leon

i have never shared a youtube vid while logged in

It can't share my personal account if I'm never signed in.

If you never sign into YouTube and sharing links from a third party application, what is it that they append? Curious what makes up that shared id.

Is

https://f-droid.org/packages/com.svenjacobs.app.leon

I use this, and it works really well for the big apps and services.

vm.tiktok.com links do the same (they give a popup with the user that shared it). If an Instagram url has the igshid or igsh (can't remember which one), it can do the same.

I share everything through URLCheck on Android. You can also set it as your default browser to clean every link you click as well.