Just to add some clarity, it's not that it "can leak" your account name, it deliberately pops up your account name and profile photo above the video to anyone that clicks the link.

It is but try to explain this to a regular user and they will call you a tinfoil hat nerd

I don’t think this is that big of a problem today, after so many privacy leaks people are a bit more aware, at least in my experience. Also tiktok actually shows a popup that the link contains information about your account.

Ya, most people get that there is no privacy. Where I think you get more of the "tinfoil hat" accusations is that a lot of people don't care or don't recognize the far reaching implications of lack of privacy.

In my experience most people do understand the basic structure of a URL even if they don't know the proper names for the parts. It doesn't take being a software developer to empirically figure out which parameters are responsible for tracking and delete them before sharing — especially if you see your own username in one of them.

Do “regular folk” really do this though? It is a serious, non provocative question. I strip all cruft off URLs but consider myself privacy aware and technically adept. I don’t think my non-technical friends have any idea about this.

Take a look at the URL you get when you try and share a tiktok video, and tell me which part to delete to remove the tracking

You have to visit it yourself to resolve it to a long link, then you'll get a long URL that has /@username-of-uploader/videos/[video id]?[huge amount of tracking variables]. For now, you're ok with dropping everything after the ? after you resolve out the vm.tiktok.com link shortener.

Not that it makes it any less shitty but you can disable that behaviour in the settings

Until that setting dissapears when things get suffled up after an update or something like that.

I actually had no idea that was an option.