Your Links Are Snitching On You

Copy a link from Instagram, a Google ad, or a newsletter, and you’re sharing more than a page. Tags like fbclid, gclid, igsh, and utm_ tell platforms exactly which ad you clicked, the campaign that targeted you, and even who sent you the link.

In ten minutes, I'll put real links from apps everyone in this hall uses on the screen, decode each tag live, and show three ways to strip them safely. No code needed.

I'm a third-year CS student building privacy tools in public, and this is the explainer I wish I had.

• What fbclid, gclid, igsh, and utm_ report, and who gets that data

• How to spot a tracking tag in five seconds, and which parts of a link you have to keep

• Three ways to strip them: by hand, with Firefox's built in "Copy Clean Link", or with the open source ClearURLs extension