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Friday, August 5, 2016

Stripping personal information from URL / URI


http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy-trade-idUSKCN10G1C6?feedType=RSS&feedName=businessNews&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reuters%2FbusinessNews+%28Business+News%29


For those that don't want to broadcast information to HTTP servers about where they came from, what news feed worked, etc. to a company, then you can strip it when you see a URL Universal Resource Locator / URI Universal Resource Indicator. 

In HTML, the ? symbol represents variables. Or in WWW language:

The HTTP query string is specified by the values following the question mark(?). 

So everything after the ? are variables sent to the HTML / HTTP server to process along with the request, which is the reuters article above, can be stripped from the URL request (your browser asks "Can you find me this URI?" and the server sends back files).

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy-trade-idUSKCN10G1C6?feedType=RSS&feedName=businessNews&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reuters%2FbusinessNews+%28Business+News%29
 
 Strip all characters past the ? and it still works:
 
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy-trade-idUSKCN10G1C6