For protecting our privacy we should avoid using short links as they track us. Sadly this is not always possible as a lot of sources in the internet use shortlink all over the place. For not being tracked by that links I build unshort.link. It acts as proxy between you and the shortlink to protect who you are.

What exactly does unshort.link do?

The server accesses the shortlink and follows all redirects. After it found the original source the shortlink points to it shows you a page where you can decide if you really want to visit that url. This helps to prevent phisihing attacks via shortlinks. On top unshort.link removes known tracking parameters from the urls and checks them against a blacklist to prevent you of visiting malicious sites.

How to use unshort.link?

If you are on the go you can just prepend the shortlink you want to access e.g. mys.com/ss with unshort.link/d/ or enter the url on the main page. If you want to be protected without thinking about it, use the unshort.link webextensions for Firefox and Chrome (download links are on the unshort.link page).

Why do shortlinks providers track in the first place?

It is their reason to exist. People shorten the urls to track how often that url was opened, by whom, from which countries,....

This can be interesting data for someone sharing a link, but it affects you privacy and I think that should not be that way.

But there are privacy aware shortlink services?

After posting unshort.link in different places I got answers from programmers who are claiming they build a shortlink service that does not track and I believe them. But there is no certainty that they not change there mind in the future and start tracking or worse. (One of the "privacy aware & secure" shortlink services changed my url to point to an affiliate site where he/she earns money with.)

I currently see no shortlink service that can prove it is not tracking. Okay, to be fair this is quite hard to prove:

How can I be sure that unshort.link does not track me?

To be 100% honest, you can't. There is no technical solution which could help me to show you that I am not tracking you. I have no interest in tracking you! But if you are really skeptical you can host the unshort service yourself. It is GPLv3 and can be found on https://github.com/simonfrey/unshort.link/

You than can configure the Firefox & Chrome extension to use your server instead of mine and than you are sure no one apart from yourself tracks you. Keep in mind that the service works as proxy and a proxy is more secure if a lot of people use it. So invite your friends to your self hosted server and you should be good.