Re:Pinterest quietly modifying users links to generate affil...
by nbm on Tuesday February 07, 2012 @09:50PM
(#3564815)
In Facebook's case, this is to protect the user from potentially giving away information about themselves in their Referer header and from potentially malicious links that we didn't have enough information on at display (or email) time, but which we now have enough information to know it is malicious.
This is explained in more detail at https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-security/link-shim-p...
Re:Pinterest quietly modifying users links to generate affil...
by nickbarnwell on Tuesday February 07, 2012 @09:32PM
(#3564762)
The reason most do that is to rob the site you're visiting of context about the page you're just on. If I click through from a friend's Facebook profile they can't see the referrer URL is, for example, facebook.com/nickbarnwell
I find this much more tolerable than Facebook and most search engines' practice of clicking you through an encoded link, which adds latency for no good reason.