ClearURLs - An Add-On Based On The New WebExtensions Technology And Will Automatically Remove Tracking Elements From URLs To Help Protect Your Privacy - Hacking Land

ClearURLs is an add-on based on the new WebExtensions technology and is optimized for Firefox and Chrome based browsers.

This extension will automatically remove tracking elements from URLs to help protect your privacy when browse through the Internet, which is regularly updated by us and can be found here.

Application

Many websites use tracking elements in the URL (e.g. https://example.com?utm_source=newsletter1&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=sale) to mark your online activity. All that tracking code is not necessary for a website to be displayed or work correctly and can therefore be removed—that is exactly what ClearURLs does.

Another common example are Amazon URLs. If you search for a product on Amazon you will see a very long URL, such as:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/exampleProduct/ref=sxin_0_pb?__mk_de_DE=ÅMÅŽÕÑ&keywords=tea&pd_rd_i=exampleProduct&pd_rd_r=8d39e4cd-1e4f-43db-b6e7-72e969a84aa5&pd_rd_w=1pcKM&pd_rd_wg=hYrNl&pf_rd_p=50bbfd25-5ef7-41a2-68d6-74d854b30e30&pf_rd_r=0GMWD0YYKA7XFGX55ADP&qid=1517757263&rnid=2914120011

Indeed most of the above URL is tracking code. Once ClearURLs has cleaned the address, it will look like this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/exampleProduct

Features

Removes tracking from URLs automatically in the background
Blocks some common ad domains (optional)
Has a built-in tool to clean up multiple URLs at once
Supports redirection to the destination, without tracking services as middleman
Adds an entry to the context menu so that links can be copied quickly and cleanly
Blocks hyperlink auditing, also known as ping tracking (see also this article)
Prevents ETag tracking
Prevents tracking injection over history API (see also: The replaceState() method)
Prevents Google from rewriting the search results (to include tracking elements)
Prevents Yandex from rewriting the search results (to include tracking elements)

Permissons

Reasoning for needed permissions can be found under here.

Test

If you want to test whether ClearURLs works correctly on your system, you can go to this test page: https://test.clearurls.xyz/

Contribute

If you have any suggestions or complaints, please create an issue.

Note: If you have any suggestions or complaints regarding the rules, please create an issue in this repo or email us rules.support (at) clearurls.xyz (this mail will automatically create a new issue in this repo).

Translate ClearURLs

You want to help translating ClearURLs into many languages? – Nice

You can choose between two options to contribute. You can create a merge request, or you can use the POEditor to translate ClearURLs.

Hint: The description field in the translation files are only an information for what the translation is used. It is not necessary to translate the description field; in the most cases it is empty.

Merge request

If you want to create a merge request, you must open the path _locales/en/messages.json in the ClearURLs repo and translate the english terms into terms of your language. Once you have translated all the terms, you make a pull request of your translation. Please push your translation into the folder _locales/{language code}/messages.json.

Projects that use parts of ClearURLs

Uroute used ClearURLs to filter/clean URL before launching browser
Scrub used ClearURLs to filter/clean URLs as cog for the Red Discord bot
Unalix a simple Python module that removes tracking fields from URLs and unshort shortened URLs
Unalix-nim a simple Nim library that removes tracking fields from URLs and unshort shortened URLs

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