
Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links - hiby007
http://thisinterestsme.com/facebook-fbclid-parameter/
======
patrickyeon
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](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Byv5uWSIIAEf38C.jpg)

Facebook made:
[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Byv5uWSIIAEf38C.jpg?fbclid=IwAR2...](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Byv5uWSIIAEf38C.jpg?fbclid=IwAR2MX56GldkA2L5lM94VMK_A420E4FBWsoL7lBlHdtgHs03SpXZQ2rDRUQk)

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.

~~~
basch
I believe it was breaking all NYMag links today, appears fixed on NYMags end
now.

[https://www.facebook.com/NewYorkMag](https://www.facebook.com/NewYorkMag)

~~~
patrickyeon
Sure, where "fixed on NYMags end" means "NYMags has implemented a workaround
because FB broke things".

------
pipermerriam
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?

~~~
onlyrealcuzzo
Engineer here: I used to be completely anti-tracking.

Then, I started needing analytics for my own business. Without analytics, I
wouldn't be able to sell with efficiency, and therefore, I wouldn't have a
business. Granted, the anti-consumerist in me thinks maybe as a society we
shouldn't be so concerned with our efficiency to sell. But, we live in a
capitalist world, and I don't see that changing any time soon.

The way I see it now, I'm less concerned about tracking than I am about how
big some businesses are -- especially in this space.

At every start up I know, they use analytics, and no one is doing anything
spooky. But, I'm sure there's plenty of spooky stuff going on at the
FAANGAMUs.

~~~
eveningcoffee
TL;DR version: I like tracking now because it now makes money for me.

~~~
al_chemist
As in "I was against child labour, but then I've inherited textile factory in
China and paying adult wages is not efficient".

~~~
onlyrealcuzzo
The point I was trying to make is: before I worked in the growth team at
several mid-sized startups, I had this naive assumption that tracking data was
basically the food for an evil monster.

I had this idea of an evil group of people getting together everyday and
looking at this data and somehow using it to puppet my entire online-life.

Sure, this group of people exists at every decent sized online company, and
sure they're trying to get you to spend more time and money on their
site/app/whatever, and sure this tracking data helps them.

Sure, SOME of these websites are peddling fake news or selling scams or
preying on the poor/unfortunate/uneducated/etc. But I think that's the
exception, not the norm.

Most successful companies make a product people genuinely like. There are
millions of people that would buy and enjoy this product if they knew about
it. Most companies are just trying to use this tracking data to get their
product in front of as many of those people as they can, and as few people
that don't want their product. They're trying to fine-tune their messaging to
make sure it appeals to the people that actually like their product. They're
trying to use it to figure out how to BETTER make a product people actually
want!

Again, if you're saying that increasing our efficiency in sales is a bad
thing, you're saying that capitalism is bad. But I've just come to see this
data as something that enables product evolution to occur much faster. I see
this data as something that's helping the world, mostly, get more of what it
wants.

Like everyone says, Capitalism is the worst economic system, except all the
others we've tried.

~~~
teaneedz
> Again, if you're saying that increasing our efficiency in sales is a bad
> thing, you're saying that capitalism is bad. But I've just come to see this
> data as something that enables product evolution to occur much faster. I see
> this data as something that's helping the world, mostly, get more of what it
> wants.

Unfortunately, I've seen too many product decisions catering to the
manipulative aspects of adtech. UX often suffers, not improves with ads.
Online platforms all seem to follow the same game ad monetization plan these
days which results in messes like Frankensteinish apps--see official Twitter
app.

As for actual hands on manufactured products or services, I'd like to know how
ads improved the UX.

------
mwexler
FB has already publicly announced some of these changes:

[https://www.inc.com/peter-roesler/facebook-to-allow-for-
firs...](https://www.inc.com/peter-roesler/facebook-to-allow-for-first-party-
cookies-on-october-24th.html)

[https://digiday.com/marketing/wtf-what-are-facebooks-
first-p...](https://digiday.com/marketing/wtf-what-are-facebooks-first-party-
cookies-pixel/)

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.

------
kposehn
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.

~~~
teaneedz
And another reason for me to avoid FB links. I'm sure blockers will begin
stripping that out.

FB just doesn't understand the optics they create.

~~~
SonnyWortzik
They do, and we do. But the mass sheep audience does not. All they know is:
"Does the link work?" and "Can I share it?" That's all.

~~~
teaneedz
True enough, even though there is nothing but negative sentiment these days
toward the Facebook brand.

I suppose there is someone even thinking that Portal will be good for their
home.

~~~
rock_hard
I actually ordered a Portal device for each of my family households (parents,
grand parents, siblings and in-laws) for Christmas.

I think it’s a great product and can’t wait to have mine at home.

All the fuss about tracking is non-sense. Ads are a great way to monetize
products that you want to make available to a large audience. And obviously as
a user you want meaningful ads and not just a bunch of garbage. To do that
tracking is necessary...seems like a straightforward value exchange!

I also want to note that I buy stuff frequently from ads...some of my most
loved items found me through ads! It’s frankly a great way to discover great
stuff.

Do I sometimes see ads that are not relevant? Sure, just as I see post from
friends/family that are not relevant...I just scroll by, easy as that!

~~~
welly
Nice try, Zuckerberg.

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

~~~
kageneko
I use Neat URL[0] with Firefox to strip things like that from URLs.

0: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/neat-
url/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/neat-url/)

~~~
guitarbill
That's cool, but only really protects the surfer. Instead of stripping them,
you could also either fill them with garbage values, or with more effort, swap
the parameters with another link. This would degrade the analytics results,
but might be harder to detect. And if enough people used it, you'd get some
kind of herd tracking immunity.

------
kees99
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTM_parameters)

~~~
lolc
First time I read about UTM. It looks like those parameters are used to track
ad campaigns. They provide metrics over which campaign works best.

The "fbclid" parameters on the other hand seems intended to track individual
clicks. That is, Facebook wants to keep tracking individuals when they follow
links to off-site pages.

~~~
tomnipotent
It's no different than what every other major player is already doing, they're
just now catching up.

~~~
lolc
I'm not aware of this, but maybe I'm behind the curve? Are you saying that if
somebody posts a link on Twitter, that link gets a tracking-parameter appended
when people click through? Ar what is it they ar all doing?

------
lolc
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.

~~~
vntok
My guesstimate is that the number of URLs that are shared on Facebook AND that
already have a completely orthogonal "fbclid" parameter is infinitesimal.

Maybe among the URLs shared on Facebook there are a few whose servers only
respond to a fixed amount of parameters, changing their behaviour when
additional unused parameters are appended to the query string, but I imagine
that the number of such cases is so low it's not even worth considering.

What exactly is Facebook breaking, in your opinion?

Would Facebook also break things if they were instead making an async request
to the destination and appending a custom header to it, something like
"X-Coming-From-Facebook"?

~~~
johannes1234321
> What exactly is Facebook breaking, in your opinion? > > Would Facebook also
> break things if they were instead making an async request to the destination
> and appending a custom header to it, something like "X-Coming-From-
> Facebook"?

Extra headers are typically ignored, not only since different clients send
different headers since the beginning.

I know multiple systems which however decode the query string and complain
about unknown options or don't accept a query string at all for some
resources. On the later case it is ignorance on the other case it is intensive
input validation.

~~~
lmkg
This is the reason why Google Analytics can be configured to read marketing
parameters out of the hash fragment instead of the query string. A surprising
number of sites will choke when unexpected data shows up in either the query
string or the hash fragment, but very few will choke on both (most sites that
mishandle query parameters are from an era before rich use of fragments became
common).

Notably, most links with GA marketing parameters are under the control of the
website owner. Facebook links are not. This makes such a work-around less
feasible.

------
soared
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://www.facebook.com/business/news/facebook-attribution-
a-measurement-tool-for-todays-digital-advertising-landscape)

[https://marketingland.com/facebook-attribution-now-
available...](https://marketingland.com/facebook-attribution-now-available-to-
all-advertisers-250249/amp)

[https://old.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/9pycuk/facebook_atti...](https://old.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/9pycuk/facebook_attibution_now_available/)

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...](https://www.reddit.com/r/analytics/comments/9o52yw/parameter_called_fbclid_appearing_in_referrals)

Edit - reworded to be less aggressive

~~~
maemilius
This article was posted days before any of the links you've given.

According to the metadata for the site, it was originally published on
2018-10-14 and last updated 2018-10-16.

Facebook's own article about the feature came out 5 days after this article
was published. So, at the time, Facebook _was_ being secretive about it. Aside
from that one line, the entire article reads more like "this is new, I wonder
what it does".

Lastly, when I googled "fbclid" the top 3 articles are completely unrelated to
Facebook (but, then, I'm not in marketing so this doesn't surprise me) and the
forth is this very article.

~~~
soared
That is fair, I didn't check when the author posted.

The first link (for me) when googling fbclid is the reddit post in r/analytics
I linked to, which doesn't have a ton of info but gives more than what the
author had. Though you're correct, it was posted after the author originally
posted, and I can't fault him/her for not checking in again a few days later.

------
Asking4AFriend
> you should always explicitly set the canonical URL for each page.

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

~~~
MuppetMaster42
When Google crawls your site, it doesn't know the difference between two urls
with the same path, but with different GET params.

Theres no way for them to know whether or not the extra params on the URL
change the result page. (i.e. example.com/index.php?post_id=1 and
example.com/index.php?comment_id=1 could be very different pages, or they
could be the same; you don't know).

So in comes the canonical url! This tells Google the proper url required for a
specific page. That way if Google gets to a page using two different urls, it
can tell that they are the same page.

You can list it by adding a tag to your HTML head.

You can even do face things like rewrite urls entirely (i.e. If the crawler
hits example.com/?category_id=1&item_id=2, you can correct the ugly url by
listing the canonical url as example.com/category/1/item/2)

[https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en)

------
techaddict009
This might cause issue of duplication for sites which do not have canonical
URL implemented.

~~~
vntok
Google is pretty good at automatically determining which qquery parameters
actually modify the response content (pagenb=, id=, q=, etc.) and which do not
really (sortby=, highlight=, utm_source=, gclid=) so that should not be a
problem.

