from Hacker News

Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links

by hiby007 on 10/22/18, 2:48 PM with 89 comments

• by patrickyeon on 10/22/18, 6:51 PM

  This is breaking some links. You might believe it "shouldn't", and a server "should" ignore the added params, but the reality is it's breaking them. This past weekend, I posted a link to an image on Facebook, and FB generated the preview fine, but created a link that 404's.

  My link: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Byv5uWSIIAEf38C.jpg

  Facebook made: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Byv5uWSIIAEf38C.jpg?fbclid=IwAR2...

  I guess if FB really wants, they could make a second fetch to ensure that their added params don't break the third party server. Or could they add a whitelist of domains that use their first-party tracking?

  I really don't like the end result right now, looking like "the web works" from inside FB, but not when you try to follow this link out of it. I don't believe at all that that is FB's intent here, but it's just one more time that some silo breaks another part of the ecosystem, and to an untrained eye it looks like the third party is the culprit.

• by pipermerriam on 10/22/18, 5:28 PM

  There are a number of comments here who seem genuinely happy about this. This is a perspective that is hard for me to understand, largely because I'm strongly in the pro-privacy, anti-tracking ideology.

  So if you are part of the group who sees this as a good thing, I'm genuinely interested to understand why you see this as a good thing and whether you view the mass surveillance of the general public by advertising companies as bad?

• by mwexler on 10/22/18, 3:19 PM

  FB has already publicly announced some of these changes:

  https://www.inc.com/peter-roesler/facebook-to-allow-for-firs...

  https://digiday.com/marketing/wtf-what-are-facebooks-first-p...

  Basically, FB is expanding its tracking, allowing 1st party vs. their third party cookie tracking. I suspect the click-id query string is part of that rollout. This helps it get around things like Apple's new ITP (Intelligent Tracking Prevention). 2.0 in Safari.

• by kposehn on 10/22/18, 3:43 PM

  This is actually fantastic news for advertisers that have their own data warehouses and need to create a better 1-to-1 click tracking to internal user data. This allows much better attribution and testing of incrementality so businesses can tell where their value is truly coming from.

  I’m pretty excited to see this roll out more broadly.

• by berbec on 10/22/18, 3:16 PM

  I can see urls eventually being thousands of characters long with referral links daisy chained.

• by kees99 on 10/22/18, 3:31 PM

  I wonder why would fb move away from the well-established utm [1] link parameters to this? From the article, I can't see any functional difference.

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTM_parameters

• by lolc on 10/22/18, 3:26 PM

  So they're modifying URL? Facebook is breaking things. But sure, they've run the numbers and decided they don't care.

  Browsers will now have to resort to removing query parameters to prevent tracking. And websites should really use click-to-enable sharing buttons to prevent Facebook from snooping on everything.

• by soared on 10/22/18, 3:43 PM

  Author failed to do any research, instead of going for the typical "FB is doing something secretive and cryptic" angle. Related links that explain this:

  https://www.facebook.com/business/news/facebook-attribution-...

  https://marketingland.com/facebook-attribution-now-available...

  https://old.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/9pycuk/facebook_atti...

  This hn thread is a perfect example of a news bubble. Googling "fbclid" returns the answer in the first result, but hn votes up an article that has no information and treats it as some secret tracking that fb has implemented. HN is excessively biased against any discussion of tracking/analytics on the internet. The community allows no room for true discussion - only blatantly biased opinions.

  https://www.reddit.com/r/analytics/comments/9o52yw/parameter...

  Edit - reworded to be less aggressive

• by Asking4AFriend on 10/23/18, 1:33 AM

  > you should always explicitly set the canonical URL for each page.

  Could someone explain or give a reliable article that explains this well?

• by techaddict009 on 10/22/18, 3:43 PM

  This might cause issue of duplication for sites which do not have canonical URL implemented.