more privacy and more difficulty following you [Actualizado]

UPDATE: Apparently this way of shortening URL variables would only work in incognito mode in the case of Safari. This is perhaps one more reason to use it frequently.

Newcomer iOS 17 continues to surprise us as developers test every corner of its first beta. Something interesting that was found is that some system apps detect web addresses you share with other people and change them if they are too long. What seems like a detail hides a lot of potential.

It’s all about privacy: some web addresses you share contain things that could become identifiers that trackers could use to monitor your web activity, and Apple has decided to nip that in the bud. Bad news for trackers and services that depend on selling this information.

Tracking will get more complicated with iOS 17

Let’s get technical to understand what’s going on: some web addresses we share contain parameters, plugins called Queries which are used in the PHP language to determine certain aspects of our activity on the network. For example, the raw URL for a website article might be:

webdenoticias.com/articulo/35351

But if you accessed this article from instagram using an iPhone, the URL you are using may be:

webdenoticias.com/articulo/35351?dispositivo=iphone&?origen=instagram

You see the pattern, don’t you? these are variables that are added to the web address, which feed many data tracking tools. iOS 17 wants to put an end to this, identifying the variables that can be used against our privacy and by deleting them so that the address used is the original one.

The consequence may be that many tools that measure the origin of web traffic, analytics on which many advertising campaigns depend, see your distorted and “fuzzy” data

. iOS 17 users will hide the path they took to reach a specific web address. They can also suffer from affiliate links, which are very dependent on these types of addresses.

These services will have to adapt, as Safari remains the default browser for millions of people who use an iPhone. But Apple is Apple in this regard: privacy as a user promotion and marketing tool.

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