Bye Bye, Link Tracking 👋

Important

This software is still in early development. See planned features.

Are you a part-time privacy preserver and want to bring your link-sharing to the next level? Bye bye, link tracking has your back (well, actually your link). Because who needs link tracking anyway.

What does it do?

You probably stumbled across si in YouTube links (e.g. https://youtu.be/xvFZjo5PgG0?si=SomeFancyTextHere) or similar add-ons to links (e.g. UTM parameters) at some time already. These additions are not necessary for any functionality but rather allow for tracking link clicks, marketing campaigns, etc.

Bye bye, link tracking is installed as a service on your system that monitors your clipboard. As soon as it identifies a URL in your clipboard that has tracking additions, it automatically replaces the link with a purged version. You manually removing it is not necessary anymore.

How to Install

Download a release from the releases tab and move the config file to /home/$USER/.config/byebyelinktracking/config.json.

If you want to autostart byebyelinktracking for your user, move it to /usr/bin/byebyelinktracking and create a file byebyelinktracking.service at /home/$USER/.config/systemd/user/ with the following content (file is also available in the repository):

[Unit]
Description=Removes tracking from copied links.

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/byebyelinktracking
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Note

If you have a custom config location (not /home/$USER/.config/byebyelinktracking/config.json), you can add the -c option at ExecStart.

Then run the following commands to enable your service:

systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable byebyelinktracking.service

You're good to go!

Build from Source

Clone this repository

git clone https://github.com/niri81/byebyelinktracking

Build the Executable

go build -o byebyelinktracking

Run the Executable

./byebyelinktracking -h

Planned Features

• YAML Support for config files
• Service installation instructions
• Further code tidying and more options depending on necessity
• Muuuuuch more entries to the config file :) (PRs welcome)