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Protecting your privacy

We are actively working on detecting and adding more privacy preserving features. Keep eye on this document.

By default big tech companies like Facebook or Google do a lot of dirty tricks to track you in background when you are on their platforms, without you even noticing.

This plugin takes the responsibility to protect you as much as possible from this.

Below you can find what we prevent on each platform.

Table of contents

Facebook

Click tracking

When you click on an external link while browsing facebook.com (let's say some article linked from a post), several things happen.

  • Facebook adds fbclid query parameter to the url you are about to visit. This allows FB to track that you have clicked the link and allows them to further track your activity when you land on that external page.
  • Facebook also does an AJAX request to https://www.facebook.com/si/linkclick/ajax_callback/ with a lot of personal data and again tracks your click, browser etc.
  • Facebook replaces the original article link with l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://the-real-url.com just in case you have javascript enabled or you try to copy the link to the article to a friend. This again tracks your click.

Presence tracking

Periodically Facebook pings https://www.facebook.com/ajax/bz with a lot of personal data as well, indicating what you are looking to, time spent etc.

What Clean Links do to prevent all this?

  • Clean Links removes fbclid query parameter from the links you visit.
  • Clean Links blocks all ajax requests to https://www.facebook.com/si/linkclick/ajax_callback/
  • Clean Links blocks all ajax requests to https://www.facebook.com/ajax/bz
  • Clean Links prevents opening links from l.facebook.com domain and instead will open the real domain you intended to open, without letting Facebook to track you.

Google

Click tracking

  • When you search for something on Google and you click on a search result, Google silently swaps the real url with https://google.com/url?u=https://you-real-url&more-tracking-params and tracks your click.

What Clean Links do to prevent all this?

  • Clean Links prevents opening links like https://google.com/url?u=... and instead opens the real link you've intended to open, without letting google track you.