Legitimate questions...

Can anyone else confirm this doesn't happen if you use the old school .compact version of Reddit? I've been on that for years and prefer it.

Are u using ad blockers https://www.yahoo.com/news/thousands-websites-quietly-fighting-ad-053300698.html

Gosh yes. I have been using them so long I actually forgot about that part.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/thousands-websites-quietly-fighting-ad-053300698.html

For sure.. we are not free. Not even in reddit. Cellphones have gps so we are tracked constally...

Then don’t use a cellphone lol. Oh wait they took away payphones mostly everywhere.

And if you do, by some miracle, find one, it costs a dollar a minute.

Yeah, called my wife when visiting mall of America from a payphone. My cell died and had no other way. Made 4 calls, the first three I couldn't hear anything on the other end. 4th call I could hear her. Got a bill for 146 dollars... This was about 5 min of time. How the duck does that make any sense. Charged that shit back.

I'll take "made up bullshit for 600," Alex!

Why the fuck would I lie about that. Trust me, I nearly had a heart attack and thought my card got skimmed. It was a payphone with a credit card reader and didn't have the posted rates. For some reason the "fee" to use a credit card was stupid expensive (I called them...) It's brilliant on their part. Phones are in a noisy ass place and you can't hear the rates being stated at the beginning of the call. They refused to refund my money so I did a charge back on my amex. So no, not made up bullshit.

Most major cities I've been to offer free phone services near tourist kiosks 🤷

New York, Orlando, Sacramento, and New Orleans at least.

Lol I usually just borrow some sympathetic person's phone. Advantages of looking like a kid.

and they don't even try to hide it. I went out with my girlfriend last week, Wednesday, and on Monday i was asking her "what day did we go out" and she didn't know. So i went until google maps and tracked it back. The worst part is it seems most people are still unaware of this tracking, she certainly wasn't

While it could be used maliciously, it's mostly just handy.

You can disable this on your phone. But, disabling all the available selections relating to tracking doesn't stop your phone from tracking you anyway and storing the info where you can't get to it.

Put your phone in a Faraday sleeve when you want to go stealth.

That plus something that insulates sound too. Then there are the rest of the sensors that can still monitor movement. And then hope everyone else does the same.

Oh, yes, all that, too. It's hopeless ; )

Roll up your sleeve for the chip and get it over with.

lol they'll just inject it in you while you're an infant

I'm guessing they want to understand how links are shared and used, so they can justify charging x amount of dollars for a sponsored post by showing how often it was clicked

$$$$$

Dollar dollar hills yall

Cash rules every thing around me. Get the money

This is correct. Every platform with a substantial amount of traffic begins to optimize how much revenue it can generate from user data. It's so natural for a company to do this that I would definite it as an organic process.

Even though the original post points to all of the potential negatives, and they are totally possible, that's just worst case scenario.

Yes. This is just A/B testing. Email marketing campaigns do the same thing. You split an email that’s being sent out to masses into different batches/groups. Each group is then compared to each other. Could be one group reviewed the email at 2pm and another at 6pm. Sometimes the emails have slightly different content. This helps determine what contents performs better.

In this case it’s unlikely that the user has the suffix tied to their username. More likely a wide group of users see the same suffix. Realistically though, you would be placed into a group because of information/data they already have on you.

jim and joe are from the Midwest and both upvoted this cat video. Group A

I wouldn't count on it being quite so simple. There's great value in amassing as much personal information as can be collected on an individual user. I don't believe that they would waste the opportunity to glean as much data as is made available by this identifier.

As the CEO said, they know things about their users that other sites don't know.

Exactly. And he's an ass, anyway.

Trust but certify. ; )

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by greed.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/thousands-websites-quietly-fighting-ad-053300698.html

Makes sense!

Does this happen even after you disable all the privacy shit in settings?

What I had to disable privacy shit? I thought this was a website and that's all.

Nah there's a bunch of settings you gotta fuck with for max privacy. I'm on mobile so I can't check rn.

Implying that's not just a placebo lul

It's a range of effectiveness. There's nothing you can do against high level government and corporations but lower level shit can be stopped.

It used to be like that. Now they track every user and it's your responsibility to disable tracking if you don't want that. (but it's not like spez would tell you that obviously)

I still use Alien Blue. Can they track me through that?

Yes.

Every time reddit does an update on the apps, it resets those preferences. Make sure you double check if you update.

I use a 3rd party app, does that prevent it?

log in on a computer and check your settings, they can't be changed on the app I use. I've unchecked "allow reddit to log my outbound clicks for personalization" dozens of times.

I'm good for rn. The app I use has a shortcut to get to reddit preferences which is handy.

I hear that a lot but mine have not changed since I joined reddit years ago. I keep checking though, as y'all make me paranoid.

privacy shit

Really, adjusting your privacy settings is somewhat useless in the big picture.

Here's one article that just touches on how we're tracked (2016). There are more unique identifiers and tracking systems that have and are being developed and it will continue. As soon as we are able to foil one, sure as shit, a more complex system/method prevails.

Imagine all your FB messages/posts, phone texts, emails, doctor visits, tax issues, reddit posts, search inquiries, sites visited, text (comments, personal data, whatever) typed into some text box but then deleted or abandoned, anything you've browsed or entered online. Words spoken around your devices, things visually done in range of your device camera lens (oh!). Imagine it's all in the process of being captured and eventually fully aggregated under your unique user id.

The only way to reduce the continued leaking of your private information/habits/contacts is to quit using your computer, phone and any other 'smart' devices. Not even a VPN or TOR is failsafe. Not saying it doesn't make sense to initiate any precautions you can right now.

However, since 99.9% of every entity we do some sort of business with is already spewing all your personal data out to the online world, well, we've all already been pretty much exposed and there's really no going back.

Yeah I try to limit it as much as possible but I'm sure I still leak a lot. But less than an average person though. I'd hope so for all the extensions and privacy permissions shit I fuck with.

Yeah, me, too, lol. But I always have the thought in the back of my mind that it's all "for show" and someone, somewhere, is laughing at me. ; )

Nah at the very least this shit keeps info from all the lower level leaky ass data miners. While the DoD and big 4 still have your shit, at least they're somewhat more competent than most other companies getting your data.

Some, I suppose. The owners of the sites, however, have access to a lot of information that browser & proffered site privacy settings can't control.

However, yes, I still toggle all the settings anyway. Some of it has to be be useful somehow, and that's worth something. If just to make me feel a little better.

Gotta extension the fuck out too, otherwise you get raped by Google analytics and AWS. Get like Privacy Badger and Disconnect. And Ublock origin, HTTPS everywhere, Cookie autodelete and Decentraleyes.

haha, right! I have most all those plus overkill with Ghostery, AdBlock+ and a couple non-browser scripts for deeper protection.

I'll check into Decentraleyes and Disconnect. So far my browser hasn't screamer "Mercy" yet, but those two may tip the scales, lol.

Get rid of ghostery and abp. Replace with everything I mentioned above. Those two collect data of their own and whitelist sites that pay them off.

Ohhh. I'll check that out for sure, good to know, thanks!

What extensions do you use?

HTTPS Everywhere, privacy Badger, disconnect, Decentraleyes, Cookie autodelete, ublock origin

Check out uMatrix, from the creator of uBlock Origin

Too much work, it's basically noscript but harder to set up. I'm done with all the noscript type shit.

well, we've all already been pretty much exposed and there's really no going back.

Indeed. I have though maybe the "way out" would be to spill the data openly to the public. Give up on the idea of privacy and make it all public. Obviously nobody is going to do that when they have everything to gain from said data, but just aswell as "they" can monitor us, there's a lot we could monitor too.

As an example, only a few people per a small city participating using software defined radios to monitor & triangulating signals could give away the locations of people. Would need to be correlated with some other data to make sense who's who, but doable nonetheless.

Unfortunately that's illegal in many places or if not in everywhere. But so should be this one sided data collection too.

Can't speak for reddit settings but with privacy badger, scriptsafe and https everywhere I don't get any of this.

Good work! Prepare to be banned though :/

What you said surely has to be a joke?

Yes, I'm of no importance lol.

Good work! Prepare to be banned though :/

Are there differences in the pages at all? This sounds like it could be standard A/B testing for new features, etc.

They’re probably doing it to track brigading. If they know a particular link’s been shared by a specific sub they’ll be able to track how often it was visited.

They could also feasibly track it back to the original (re)poster / meme patient zero. Imagine getting criminal charges because some nutjob saw what you shared and killed someone.

If you are using an account to browse, you can go to the settings and disable click tracking and other things that interfere with your privacy. I don't know if that works, but it is an option.

Truth

You are correct, but I don't think reddit is the place for anyone too concerned about tracking. If you ever really get a piece of conspiracy theory that could threaten your life, under no circumstances post it here.

Yeah I was wondering when doing private browsing in firefox why i was still getting what appear to be targetted ads (rare medical condition).

To my understanding, if other tracking methods fail they just use the IP which then again links back to your last profile.

I made a mistake I double checked and using the private browser the ads go away, logging out they don't. My bad.

Try Epic browser

This is true. Could this be https://www.yahoo.com/news/thousands-websites-quietly-fighting-ad-053300698.html

Good sleuthing OP, some things they might be doing with this... 'subtle' tracking feature:

• Brigade tracking, seeing when a link is bringing in a bunch of users from different subs to sway the opinion of a sub (down/upvote). Makes it easier to ID the 'problem' subs.
• Bot tracking, similar to brigading, the bots swarm on a post from a central link. Easy to track down the whole net and ban them.
• User tracking, association of alts with mains
• Origin tracking, having a more solid grasp of userbases and demographics

If it's done through JavaScript, chances are bots will bypass that.

Not necessarily, many include JavaScript into their bots because they need to to load up CloudFlare

Based on literally any time we get hit by a TMOR brigade and we've tried to ask the admins for help, they don't care about brigades, at least not directed at this sub. There's no way they don't have the tools to detect them either.

They have been somewhat helpful with ban evaders, sometimes.

Anyone who thinks that these social media sites are not doing everything in their power to track and exploit their users is a naive dumb ass.

I think about that with Trumps T witter account, I can't imagine there is no one from T witter who can access his account if they want.

I thought the very same thing. Is there not anyone on his staff with the balls to tell him to stay the hell off of social media?

I don't read twerps, tweets, or spacebook for that very reason. Totally unreliable sources.

Yeah, but they use cookies for it. It's a pop-up on the front page. It's more thorough and less noticeable than this stuff that OP's talking about.

If I turn off an add blocker I get the same ads at home as I do at work - never logged in to my personal email at work, or any social media, or Google account. I can tell what my wife shops for online at home because I gets ads for it at work.

You are right...

We can run, but we can't hide.

You misunderstand...

OP is trying to find meaning in the china pattern on the RMS Titanic, positing that the pattern was so expensive that it must mean that corners were cut in construction.

OP wonders this in a dining room ankle-deep in freezing cold sea water. OP is angry that the sounds of panicked passengers trying to throw women and children into life boats that have already launched is distracting them from the thought that maybe some aspect of this ship won't make it as seaworthy long term as was first touted.

It's not a "we can run but we can't hide" thing at all - it's that OP is wondering about tracking when Reddit has been tracking all of us for years, and literally tells you this when you go to the website for the first time. This is about people doing some amateur hour navel contemplation and if we're all supposed to be here clapping for them while they do it because other people weren't even that observant. It's common on Reddit - /r/moviedetails is a prime example. People get buckets of upvotes for noticing things like the point of the plot. Why waste all these resources on circle-jerking when you've become desensitized to the reality that's worse?

That was such an excellent analogy, I only had to read it once to understand your concise point.

My "run but not hide" comment was a generalization. Of course the cow was out of the barn long ago.

There are a myriad of ways that agencies and other entities can track, obfuscate and manipulate online activities.

I was telling people about it 30 years ago and when I got to trying to explain Alice Springs, people's eye's glazed over, right before they spewed, "well, if I'm not doing anything wrong."

I did not "misunderstand" I was making a generalization directly relating to the futility of attempts to circumvent privacy intrusions.

Thank you.

Finally something real. Usually these end up being dumb rants or technical misunderstandings.

This reminds me of North Korea. They use a custom linux OS called red star I think. It adds a traceable watermark to any document you make in the word processor.

And printers worldwide add such a watermark to every page.

Can you show me what you are talking about?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_steganography

^ That.

I've heard this before, but I'm not aware of the veracity. I wonder if it's a misinterpretation of the fact that each print exhibits signature traits that are often traceable to the model of printer from which they originate.

Most colour laser printer do it, adding small yellow dots usually encoding a printer serial, sometimes timestamp. Was started in fear of people using them for high quality banknote forgery. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_steganography

Non-Mobile link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_steganography

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That was the reason they gave us, and it might have even been true at the time, but most color laser printers couldn't give you a realistic enough bill anyway. This is for tracking purposes at this point.

Modern laser printing is more than good enough to produce a passable paper note if you can source the proper paper, which is part of why most countries are switching to plastic notes.

Wouldn't a captcha test filter out all the bots? Why do we need the statement to prove you are human?

Don't post anything you would not want the
whole world to know you posted.

There are better ways for the spooks to de-anonymize users (web-rc, owning 2/3 of public tor nodes, etc...). More likely that they're trying to quantify grassroots/AstroTurfing phenomena in order to use 'artificial intelligence' and 'machine learning' to optimize the spreading of their fake pro-clinton news. Trying to follow the life cycle of a link to their site as it spreads around groups of people. Lets go back to getting dirt on podesta the molestah.

Reddit is mostly free for users and there's no such thing as a free lunch.

We're using this website for free and we are the products. That's not a conspiracy, that's reality.

We are also 100% content providers and as such do have some say in things. Without us, no reddit.

I agree with your logic...it's the same reasoning used for the creation of labor unions. And we all know how well corporate america respects that sort of thinking :(

The mystery of what happens to shared links is finally being unraveled by science. Let's not be petty and get in the way of progress.

Oh fuck... watch out, Reddit is getting RESTful... must be a conspiracy to deliver better content. By far the dumbest shit I’ve seen yet.

I have noticed something that is even more nefarious related to this. In my browser, reddit is injecting Googla Analytics marketing GET parameters into URL when I click somewhere and then removing them from the URL via Javascript before the page finishes loading so I do not even notice them unless I am looking.

Here is what I mean: https://imgur.com/a/ZRupN

https://www.yahoo.com/news/thousands-websites-quietly-fighting-ad-053300698.html

Not saying this is for marketing purposes, but things like this are used in order to test multiple marketing campaigns by splitting them across your user base and seeing which ones perform better.

The real issue OP is Portillos, Gene and Jude’s, or the Weiners circle?

BTW this post is hidden on the front of /r/conspiracy. Can't find it unless it's linked elsewhere. Something is afoot!

Screenshot? Shows up fine for me.

Reddit will do everything it is told to do by them cunts that's ruining the life on earth. The only difference is in methods of how they do it. Be sure this thread is closely monitored. Wouldn't surprised if this post gets deleted or something.

so i dont get how you can say only 2 users have ever clicked on www.link.reddit.com/link.htmstorsh

wouldnt everyone get st or sh in the link??

My app has been sketchy since the update. It crashes often and will consistently freeze up for about a minute every time I try to post a comment..

There's not a way to undo this, is there??

When in doubt, assume Reddit does not have your interests in mind. They are far from the company of last decade.

There are tools out there that are already match your so called anonymous to various profile charateristics. Have a smartphone? You are already sharing a bunch of location data that says a lot about you.

I don't get it. Why do people here STILL not get that if you are not paying for something you are the product not the consumer.

Could be trying to get a handle on the bots and paid trolls that have been pouring in as well. There doesn't always have to be a nefarious motive behind this kind of tracking. Still, i see your point.

Here's a couple of big changes to Reddit from this month that haven't been mentioned in /r/announcements or /r/blog as far as I know.

Reddit partners with brand engagement platform Sprinklr. From the presser

Sprinklr, the most complete social platform for managing customer experiences at scale, today announced an expanded partnership with Reddit, allowing brands to access historical and real-time Reddit data, send and receive private messages and publish to any subreddit all within Sprinklr’s platform. Global companies can now use Sprinklr to listen to what customers are saying, analyze trending topics and manage Reddit customer care directly through the Sprinklr platform.

Microsoft looks to make Bing results smarter with new AI-powered features and Reddit partnership. To quote,

Additionally, the company announced a partnership with Reddit to surface results from the site more effectively. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian announced that the two were collaborating to integrate Reddit content more directly into Bing search results, funneling info from Reddit crowd-sourced AMAs and other posts into Bing. You can ask Bing things like, “How accurate is HBO’s Band of Brothers?” and highly up-voted responses will be right there for users on Bing.

...

The partnership is also focused on taking the detailed, highly-localized info from Reddit posts and funneling it into Bing searches so that users with similar prompts can be given more nuanced answers. Reddit’s UI is famously not that great on desktop, so Microsoft distilling the wall of text in a more effective manner is pretty essential.

You people still believe there is "privacy"? And that governments etc are really interested what you are doing? Damn, I see people going to toilets with phones and facebook apps open, not to mention that the phone is iPhone... what are you, nuts?!

1) invent your own internet 2) write your own codes and laws 3) try to keep your new open, free and 100% anonym net shit working and not hacked etc.

You guys really believe that you have "some rights" here in internet that you have not invented, funded, helped or anything else. You wanna be "free"? Run to the jungle where no wifi can reach. Or get buried into Russian Gulag where nobody cares.

I've been stripping unneeded parameters from query strings for years.

OK so immediate 'escalation association' for me is to think of the reddit logo. The alien. I'm not kidding here, but maybe reddit has to be under certain level of control by deep state/TPTB... and since reddit cannot make a handsign (devil's horns, mason sign etc)... they need some other logo....

alien logo = "everything is under control... we are in line with the hidden offworld allies that no insider can expose".

This theoretically could be used by an engineer or analytics algorithm to reveal hidden user groups

Maybe Reddit admins have decided to enforce their ToS against people who use the site for organized PR campaigns? Probably not all of them, of course, since certain organizations clearly have implicit permission to operate on the site, but maybe they're going to use this kind of tracking to identify unwanted shill organizations to shut them down?

"How many users arrive via shares? Are they new to reddit? What types of posts are being shared?" - https://www.reddit.com/live/x3ckzbsj6myw/updates/81c57a78-3cb5-11e6-84fb-0e395ea06b87

It's very good marketing material and would be useful for knowing what users want.

It's pretty suspicious though, they would have done a little more talking in the post about what they're doing with the material if they weren't being shady.

I was using the official Reddit app for mobile, until the spyware made it unusable. After I subscribed to this sub and commented and viewed the post about the Vegas shooting being tied to Saudi Arabia, the record/body sensor light on my phone kept turning on for no reason. The app started slowing down, then started mixing up links that I clicked on. Finally the app refused to load most everything and drained my battery within minutes of use. After I deleted the app and started using a third party, everything stopped, the sensor doesn't go off randomly anymore either. Be careful out there. Don't draw too much attention, or they will re-assess your metadata.

Yep, there are Google Ananlytics and Amazon scripts running on all Reddit's pages, so to stop them,

Use NoScript .. an addon for Firefox and Chrome, which allows you to decide which scripts can run => you can ban the Google stuff and only allow the Reddit stuff .. whichisn't much, but it's a start

My friend, as a software engineer and web developer I can tell you that this tactics have been done now for over a decade. URL is one technique but cookies are another. Here is what makes your browser activity unique to us even if you block cookies and ads. Browser window size, OS, browser, browser version, location, region, ISP, DNS, IP, even the hops you make.

People have predictable browsing patterns that can be tracked even without cookies. You just have to track everything and you will start to see patters.

url params are usually used as a way to track back the link in order to pay out the refer. Those IDs st and sh are probably the affiliate IDs and a some unique identifier to track the link hopping activity.

What you need to understand is this. If you click on a link it is stored somehwere with all the details I have specified above and even more data that you probably would not even think of, but they track it. Not because they are actively tracking you, but because they will eventually use it to find patterns and trends for advertising reasons or what ever they like to do with it. There is no way around it, unless you are doing things to keep them from doing that. Which I will say, it is also tracked as a pattern. If you go out of your way to stop these tracking mechanism, that activity is also tracked and stored as a pattern.

If you log in with a VPN, tracked, if you block cookies, tracked, if you have an ad blocker, tracked, if you block cookies, tracked, all of those "security measures" create a profile on you as well.

There is no place to hide, the only way to hide is in plain sight.

What is the purpose of the movie V for Vendetta? If Everyone is V then he is truly anonymous.

YES. much agreed

https://www.yahoo.com/news/thousands-major-sites-taking-silent-212908424.html javascript rewriteen to get ad blockers

https://www.yahoo.com/news/thousands-websites-quietly-fighting-ad-053300698.html

I Think a chrome extension would resolve this by removing unwanted parameters before sending them to the server or even exactly before navigation. I would make one if I get enough upvotes.

/u/ccrama does this stuff also happen on slide? Is there a way to check?

It is only on the web browser

Thanks man. Great that you're the one dev that responds anytime anywhere on Reddit. Really appreciate it.

You're welcome! Glad to answer any questions especially regarding privacy

As a digital marketing professional, I could definitely see why they're doing this test. We do this a lot to track user behavior, which I could see them wanting to do to improve the user experience for their app, or tracking behavior differences between desktop, mobile, and tablet users.

When sharing a link, I only copy the part to the left of the ? in the URL, in most cases, this links to the article without any identifying information.

*tests it out*

So, I went to /r/all and clicked on https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/7mwcoo/buddy_of_mine_took_this_amazing_picture_in_south/ , and it changed the link to https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/7mwcoo/buddy_of_mine_took_this_amazing_picture_in_south/?utm_content=comments&utm_medium=hot&utm_source=reddit&utm_name=all . After the page loaded, the url in the title bar switched back to https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/7mwcoo/buddy_of_mine_took_this_amazing_picture_in_south/ . Because it kept erasing the parameters, I had to re-click on the page a bunch of times trying different ways to capture the whole url before the tail of it vanished. I finally got it with ctrl-A ctrl-C.

So... whatever you're seeing is not happening on my account.

I have seen what you're describing happen on other websites, though. I'll be on some website, and it'll add ?=29fsauifyhv9 or whatever at the end. So I test it a few times to see if the link works without that bit, and it does. So, the extra bit must be for tracking who came from which link posted by who. I always strip it off at the end - even if I didn't care about tracking, it just makes the link look ugly and unnecessarily long. But I think if I see that again, I just won't link to those sites.

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Shush.

Probably happens on in r/conspiracy the joos that run Reddit have to keep any eye on those crazy Republican klan members

Non-Mobile link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_steganography

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That was the reason they gave us, and it might have even been true at the time, but most color laser printers couldn't give you a realistic enough bill anyway. This is for tracking purposes at this point.

Check out uMatrix, from the creator of uBlock Origin