Unshort.link

Prevent short link services from tracking you 👀

1 follower

Prevent short link services from tracking you 👀

1 follower

Unshort.link protects your privacy by being a proxy between you and the shortlink services. It helps against malicious short links asou see the url that is hidden behind the shortlink before you acess it. On top we check the url against a blacklist.

Launch tags:Privacy

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Waywo

Maker

I did build the link unshorten service unshort.link to protect me against link shorteners (e.g. bitly, tinycc) tracking me, if there are any question regarding unshort.link coming up I am happy to answer them here in the comments 🥰 ⏩ 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗲𝘅𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗹𝘆 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝘂𝗻𝘀𝗵𝗼𝗿𝘁.𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸 𝗱𝗼? The server accesses the shortlinks (e.g. https://tinyurl.com/qlhjpjn) for you and directly redirects you to the long url of it. By doing so, the shortlink service can't track you as they only see the IP address of unshort.link. It acts as proxy between you and the service. On top of that, it removes known tracking parameters (e.g. utm_source) and checks the sites against a blacklist. ⏩ 𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗱𝗼 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝘃𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗲? It is their reason to exist. People shorten the urls to track how often that url was opened, by whom, from which countries,.... This can be interesting data for someone sharing a link, but it affects you privacy and I think that should not be that way. ⏩ 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗜 𝗯𝗲 𝘀𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘂𝗻𝘀𝗵𝗼𝗿𝘁.𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝗺𝗲? To be 100% honest, you can't. There is no technical solution which could help me to show you that I am not tracking you. I have no interest in tracking you! But if you are really skeptical you can host the unshort service yourself. It is GPLv3 and can be found on https://github.com/simonfrey/uns... You than can configure the Firefox & Chrome extension to use your server instead of mine and than you are sure no one apart from yourself tracks you. Keep in mind that the service works as proxy and a proxy is more secure if a lot of people use it. So invite your friends to your self hosted server and you should be good.

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7yr ago

Wow.. Privacy is becoming a trend. 2020.. may be more privacy focus app will appear.. Hope ads will not be shown while we unshortlink.

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7yr ago

Waywo

Maker

@rahulgemawath Currently it is easy for me to finance the service out of my own pocket. If it grows bigger there might be some way of getting money for the infra. Ads could be a way, but as it is oposed to what the users of unshort.link like I consider it to be one of the last options.

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7yr ago

RSS API

Interesting approach! The fact that URL Shortening services collect EVERYTHING about their visitors was the reason I made shrtco.de - It's still the only URL Shortner (I can find) which doesn't track anything about its visitors. Maybe you can give it a try and tell me what you think! :)

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7yr ago

Waywo

Maker

@anthemaker I know about your service and like it, but still the problem here is that there is IMO no user for shortlinks apart from tracking. Maybe you do not track now, but do that in the future. This is what unshort.link tries to prevent. Personally I like and follow your work (Twitter :D) and think you are doing awesome work. But still I think that using shortlinks is a bad idea after all.

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7yr ago

RSS API

@eu_frey First of all: thanks for the nice words! Second, I think that there is another use for Short URL services apart from tracking. In the beginning of URL Shorteners, they were solely used to make long links shorter so you could post them to services like Twitter where characters mattered and to be able to use them in the offline world (print media, remembering links, posters, ads, ...) After that, services like bitly became popular because they track everything about the short-link visitors and provide this data to the creator of the links. There currently is no URL Shortener that just focuses on shortening links like in the "old days" and not collecting data. That's the reason I made shrtco.de and there are many users who come just because of this (currently we create about 16 thousend new links each and every day)

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7yr ago

Descent

urle.me does not track you or what links you shorten. I built it for my use and shared it with the world to use. The only thing I store is long url generate short url and time it was recorded. That's it. Enjoy using it.

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7yr ago

Waywo

Maker

@prodigy2m Sorry to nag you here but urle.me is worse than tracking. It brings me to the wrong site. I try to shorten t3n.de and hit the shorten button twice. Than the shortlink changes and the shortlink points to shopmoment.com (see urle.me/aqJ) not sure if I like that monetazation strategy

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7yr ago

Descent

@eu_frey Hi and thanks for your feedback. I just shorten it myself without any issues urle.me/aQL and not sure why you had an issue on your end. I will look into it however. Let me know if you run into any additional issues. You can email us directly at create@wescreen.io as we merge all of our services into under new name.

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7yr ago

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