this post was submitted on 10 May 2024
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Privacy
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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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It could only know that by navigating to the link in the background. That would have side effects, like them being able to track you even when you don't click on links.
If the link is to a redirector then that's what should show in the status line.
Fine! If there's Javascript fuckery going on, then the status line should say "WARNING: JAVASCRIPT FUCKERY!"
That should just be the title bar now
I don't pretend to know how any of this works, but the link is obviously already there in the browser, otherwise it couldn't direct you to it.
But it doesn't always point to the destination. Instead, it points to another page that then redirects you to the destination.
Your browser does not know the address of the destination, only the addresss of the middleman tracking webpage.
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The point of this is that it's a redirect. The link isn't taking you to xyz.com, it's going to abc.com which redirects to xyz.com. The abc.com server redirects to the second link -- there's no way to know where it'll take you unless you follow it.
Except if you hover over it, the browser will show you where it's redirecting to and not the tracking URL. That's the whole point.