Right, I’ve seen Slickdeals and I think Bing eventually take that on over the years: on-mouse-hover shows the original link, temporarily, until you actually right-click and copy, at which point the evil reveals itself lol.

Hmm… now I wonder if a browser add-on could circumvent the right-click interaction and stealth-copy the originally displayed link… lol, it’s nuts how far into the weeds of privacy our guerrilla warfare has been getting.

That app seems not as transparent as it could be since it doesnt give any detail on the removed stuff; I recommend URLCheck instead, which is fully transparent about all trackers and even lets you pick which ones to remove at will.

The harder ones to bypass are Facebook and Reddit share URLs, which give zero indicator of their destination; it seems impossible as the recipient of such a URL.

At least with bit.ly, one can add a + to the end of the URL and see data on it, including the original link (to then safely access without adding to its click counter).

Yeah, that’s certainly a patch. NewPipe, PipePipe, etc. all also remove ?si=.

VK is a Russian Facebook equivalent, invented by Pavel Durov who himself was eventually cast out of Russia and went on to build and run Telegram. I think he’s in France.