Share Links Thoughtfully With an iOS Shortcut
The web is full of links designed to track and surveil the people who share and receive them. With these links, corporations gather data about your interests and associate it with information they already have. They use it to construct a social graph, internally drawing connections between people who share links and those who receive them.
I’m focusing on two techniques companies use to do this:
- URL shorteners: These provide a short URL that redirects to a longer one. This allows the company generating the short URL to serve as an intermediary on your way to visiting the page, letting them track your behavior. Additionally, this obscures the original URL, making it harder to see the destination before you visit.
- Query parameters: These are keywords appended to the end of a URL which give the site you’re visiting information about where you came from or even your identity. Often times sites that use these embed scripts from third parties like Facebook and Google, allowing those corporations greater insight into your behavior around the web.
In some cases, you don’t even need to follow a link for it to share information about you, since some messengers and apps visit the link from your device before you even click it to generate a preview.¹
These are examples of links designed to track your movements around the web:
https://apple.news/AauFyDXCoSNOY6RVcJB3CGA²https://t.co/S8ClxKvEtY³https://chromamine.com/2025/07/share-links-thoughtfully-with-my-ios-shortcut/?utm_source=blog-posthttps://chromamine.com/2025/07/share-links-thoughtfully-with-my-ios-shortcut/?fbclid=IwY2xjawLbtGFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETFZekM2NFBCMlY5bDI3Q3dkAR4sSgYyJrvmhlClmy0c7hi5A45Jew2dDVQKZSS-cR2qA6h5HwxahvUGPyfzpA_aem_q3OBre7SBd0XHgWgR1iywA(This one actually won’t tell Facebook anything about you because my site doesn’t embed any Facebook scripts, but in theory it could.)
More recently, I started seeing links like this as well:
https://share.google/KKg1GjP4QTxp2Pvj5⁴
Someone told me that a Google Chrome update on Android made this the default behavior for sharing links, which to me seems like a newly crossed red line in the integration of routine surveillance into Google’s software.⁵
The Shortcut
I want to encourage people to be kind to their friends and followers by stripping tracking data from links they share. You can do this by only sharing only expanded versions of links and by removing tracking query parameters.
If you’re on iOS (or macOS), you can use this simple shortcut I created to do so:
or, if you prefer to install from Apple’s servers:
Install “Clean Copy Link” from iCloud
The shortcut will appear in any OS-native share sheet (in some apps you may have to press “More options” or a similar button to see it):
It will unwrap links from any URL shorteners, strip them of query parameters, and copy them to your clipboard for pasting.
Limitations
A few caveats:
- This will break any links that depend on legitimate query parameters, since there are non-surveillance uses for them as well. You will need to be attentive to those occasions when using this shortcut.
- This is a shortcut for someone sharing a link to use as a courtesy to whomever they are sharing it with. It does not provide much protection for someone receiving a link, since the unwrapping process happens on their device.
Room for Improvement
I made this shortcut quickly! There are improvements that could be made:
- An Android-compatible implementation, since it was an Android feature that inspired me to publish this.
- More intelligent stripping of query parameters, perhaps limited to a denylist of parameters known to be used for tracking.
- An option to preview the URL before copying it.
I may make these improvements myself at some point, but if anyone else wants to get to it first and share it back to me, I’d be happy to publish an update.
Thanks to Emma Azelborn and Emily Horsman for editing help.
A number of messengers like Signal fetch previews on the sender’s device, transferring the privacy exposure to the person who has likely already visited the site.Some apps (like Discord and Slack) fetch previews on the intermediaries’ servers, which can be more privacy-preserving in some senses and less in others. ↩︎
Unwrapped: https://www.statnews.com/2025/07/09/measles-america-breaks-33-year-record-anti-vaccine-sentiment-key-factor-behind-outbreaks/ ↩︎
Unwrapped: https://chromamine.com/2025/07/share-links-thoughtfully-with-my-ios-shortcut/ ↩︎
Unwrapped: https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/somerville-cat-mayor-election/3759084/ ↩︎
I haven’t been able to replicate this behavior myself, even asking another Android-using friend to try it, so possibly this is a new feature being tested. ↩︎