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LPT, delete the
?and everything after the link. For example,https://www.ebay.com/itm/256674765393?_skw=random+search+query&epid=305107635&itmmeta=01JAGAT958A3194F0WWPP0BMWT&itmprp=enc%3AAQAJAAAA8HoV3kP08IDx%2BKZ9MfhVJKlSz7A1nMKFudzMiZtdw6tFu1nh5DJKvXzdjdjHu2RfZAvgDUXQuOSGPo67%2BY3QcM0uz9PYr%2Fm3VgxgBHBi7PN6fzImAOW7S5fPSFRVcKGSbutH5wdKRELjEOI4BoKo0eh0DDrIUR%2FdtTPl9uhzogmFkFB4a47JGFzRO0bqDgnbCfvsInjL1niuaHX%2FSOQFhBjgPKb%2BWrV6D1mf1N0MUU2ckMNZmVhFrxx2422VJE%2FWAVMNowtm4wSnpquUv5dtQmnjdjda8SrXg%2BuARie%2B9k9hT9jThvNFQ8ORlJNg5t%2BA3EXTJ1q%2Fyw%3D%3D%7Ctkp%3ABFBM2pLpitRk
Becomes
https://www.ebay.com/itm/256674765393
While retaining the same product and removes your fingerprinting data.
This also applies for things like youtube, amazon, social media, etc. I have the cleanurls extension on firefox, yet it doesn't do a good job at removing this stuff, so I often have to manually do it before sharing links.
Mind that just removing everything after the question mark can break the link, because these parameters can also do useful things.
For example, if you use the search functionality on a webpage, you'll typically be redirected onto a URL with a parameter containing your search query.
And Firefox also has this tracking parameter removal built-in these days. In the right-click menu, you can select "Copy Link Without Site Tracking".
I cannot say, though, if this works better than CleanURLs. Because these parameters can do useful things, it's tricky to automatically remove them without breaking links.
There's gotta be an extension that does do a good job, right?
Yes there is: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clearurls/
Firefox already has a copy without tracking built in
The problem is that these parameters can also do useful things, i.e. removing them might break the link. There's no inherent criteria to determine whether a parameter is used for tracking or not.
The way these extensions or Firefox' built-in feature works, is that they check for 'well-known' parameters. For example, lots of URLs contain parameters starting with
utm_, which is from Google Analytics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTM_parametersAs such, it's for example unlikely that someone would build a website which uses a parameter
utm_mediumwith a value ofsocial, without it being used for tracking, so that gets removed.But if someone builds a website that puts your full name into a parameter called
potato, there's just no way to automatically detect and remove that.