Someone sent me a link to google maps. I do not have google maps installed. I am wondering if I clicked the link if I am communicating any data back to google that would compromise my privacy.
Google, Meta, X, Microsoft etc links and generally links contain a number of information separated by & and defined by ?. This information mostly tracks the sender but the receiver will also be associated especially if he has a Google ID, that is the link is opened through an application that is logged into Googled or has logged in in the past.
In the case of the maps you can see clearly the coordinates and then other information follows like the level of zoom etc and then information like where the link was copied from, by whom etc.
For privacy you can open the link in an incognito tab or in Tor Browser.
You’ll notice that some applications offer a choice called “Copy clean link” which removes such information from the link. For example YouTube links contain 2 types of tracking the ?si=... and ?pp=... .
You can copy the link and before visiting it delete everything except for the coordinates, of course in that case you can’t see directly some street view image, it’s all encoded in the complicated data=... parametre.
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Thanks. just making sure opening a link to any google-owned site won’t give me up. I have no google apps on my brax phone
The problem is the same for a browser that has logged into Google and you haven’t cleaned the cookies.
Certainly Google will store your IP to remember who opened the link so use either Tor or VPN.
I typically have VPN on. if I use the same VPN to the same city, won’t that give the same IP to the website everytime I hit it, even though it won’t point at my house or work specifically?
You probably get a different IP every time , they will just know it was someone using the VPN but they can’t assume that you live in the city where the VPN server is located.
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