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Comment by phoronixrly | Hacker News Reader

Oh, I have a couple - the users did not agree on being tracked (these query params are tracking information), and the site administrator does not want incoming traffic to be tracked. I know the latter can be hard to understand, but I for example sure as hell do not want to have any info in my logs that can be used to harm my users.

On a more personal note, I hate it when I go to copy a link to send via a message, and the tracking code glued onto it is twice as long as original URL... I either have to fiddle around with it to clean it up or leave the person I sent it to to wonder wtf am I on about with a screenful of random characters...

So it's violating users' privacy, it's shit UX, and on top of that, nobody asked for it...

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>(these query params are tracking information)

Query strings are useful for way more than just tracking. Saving and servicing search queries is a way more common use case. So assuming it's only useful for tracking is very misleading.

Query strings are probably the least invasive tracking. They are transparent, obvious, and anonymous. Users are free to strip out and edit query strings if they don't want them.

More to the point, I can essentially do the same thing with HTTP routing - create an infinite number of unique URLs for tracking purposes. In that regard calling out query strings specifically for essentially the same thing but more transparently seems like splitting hairs.

Yeah I do not see an alternative way to easily copy paste links with things like filter settings saved.

Filters especially make sense as query params as they are non sequential but still visually readable as to what they do.

URL slugs make sense for sequential pages that are hierarchical but make no sense for non hierarchical data/routes.

Services can force tracking into links by encoding the whole url into a shortlink that makes it impossible to just remove the tracking alone as everything is encoded into a shorter non editable string.

> Query strings are probably the least invasive tracking. They are transparent, obvious, and anonymous.

They're not necessarily anonymous. utm=Google.com is, but s=abcdefg, where abcdefg is a hash of the specific user that generated that link, identifies to the site the specific user the link was shared from.

Thank you for explaining to me that query parameters can be used for other purposes apart from tracking. The articles in question though, are railing against query parameters being abused for tracking purposes - passing referers (sic) and UTM by adding them to URLs of sites that neither process them, nor want them.

Referral query strings are not for tracking though. The person putting them on the links gets nothing out of them. There is no PII being shared. They are purely added out of courtesy.

If I am handing out maps to your address, letting people know who is publishing the map is generally a good thing.

This is like saying having a return to sender address on mail is an invasion of privacy.

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