Recently I’ve become a little more paranoid about this. I also try to remove them when I post anywhere besides private discord server, but I’m wondering how justified my paranoia is and if it’s something I should encourage others to be cautious about.
it’s one of those things where, maybe practically its unlikely to be used against you, but especially in a context like this site it seems undeniably bad to have our social networks mapped and (for those who are logged in at least) connected back to our real accounts, or at least browser fingerprints, in this way.
The way many of them work is when you click the “Share” button to grab a link to share, it creates a unique identifier tied to your account and tacks it onto the link. Then when others click it, they can get a picture of how the link spread, despite the dissemination of the link happening off site. Maybe one share generated 10,000 clicks and others might only get 1 or 2. Its likely mostly being used for marketing but there’s nothing to say if it becomes useful it couldn’t be pulled by law enforcement too to help map groups.
