According to a report this week from Ghacks Technology News, Facebook has begun using a different URL scheme for site links to make it more difficult for web browsers to prevent user tracking.

Many sites, including Facebook, add information to URLs to help track users around the web. To protect user privacy, some web browsers have begun including “URL stripping” features in their technology to remove tracking parameters from these links. However, Facebook has now combined these tracking tags with part of the required web address, making them impossible to remove.

“Since it is no longer possible to identify the tracking part of the web address, it is no longer possible to remove it from the address automatically,” tech journalist Martin Brinkmann wrote. “In other words: Facebook has the upper hand in regards to URL-based tracking at the time, and there is little that can be done about it short of finding a way to decrypt the information.”

It’s not surprising that Facebook would protect its ability to track users. After all, that’s how the company gathers a sizable amount of our data, and how it makes a profit. But still, it’s pretty troubling that the company is actively preventing users from better protecting their own privacy.

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