<story><title>Twitter is being investigated over data collection in its link-shortening system</title><url>http://fortune.com/2018/10/12/twitter-gdpr-investigation-tco-tracking/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hlandau</author><text>What&amp;#x27;s particularly insidious about a lot of these link shorteners is the use of non-semantic redirects. That is, redirects which are not based on HTTP Location: headers but things like meta http-equiv=&amp;quot;Refresh&amp;quot;. I assume this is done to allow these pages to be loaded with tracking scripts.&lt;p&gt;Of course this is a completely broken way to implement a link shortener since it won&amp;#x27;t work with non-browser tools such as curl. I tried a t.co URL with curl and it returns a Location: header, which means they&amp;#x27;re doing user agent sniffing. If you need to use user agent sniffing to make something practical, it&amp;#x27;s generally a good sign you shouldn&amp;#x27;t be doing that thing.</text></comment>
<story><title>Twitter is being investigated over data collection in its link-shortening system</title><url>http://fortune.com/2018/10/12/twitter-gdpr-investigation-tco-tracking/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>saagarjha</author><text>I really hate it when websites use shortened links instead of real ones. Twitter’s not the only website that does this; everything from Google to Discourse seems to be doing this these days. Not only is this horrible for privacy, it also makes copying links really annoying.</text></comment>