I don’t share links on here, I have reasons for this:

@BackyardShaman I've never heard that before, and have often shared a link to news articles and songs, both publicly and privately.

@BackyardShaman @Piper Let's check it out.
Here's a link to a youtube video:
https://youtu.be/fpKQOvlDr-s

The data part of it is 11 characters confined to A-Z,a-z,0-9. For simplicity we'll call it 6 bits per character; so a total of 66 bits of data payload.

Can you encode a whole email address, or IP address, or whatever into 66 bits and still have enough room for a pointer to a video? I don't think so.

On the other hand, here's the google search I used to find that video:

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https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube+grateful+dead+morning+dew&client=firefox-b-1-e&ei=MV5PY8-bHMOi5NoPn6CbkAs&ved=0ahUKEwiP-Jj4nOv6AhVDEVkFHR_QBrIQ4dUDCA4&uact=5&oq=youtube+grateful+dead+morning+dew&gs_lcp=Cgdnd3Mtd2l6EAMyCggAEEcQ1gQQsAMyCggAEEcQ1gQQsAMyCggAEEcQ1gQQsAMyCggAEEcQ1gQQsAMyCggAEEcQ1gQQsAMyCggAEEcQ1gQQsAMyCggAEEcQ1gQQsAMyCggAEEcQ1gQQsAMyDQgAEOQCENYEELADGAEyDQgAEOQCENYEELADGAEyDQgAEOQCENYEELADGAEyDQgAEOQCENYEELADGAEyDQgAEOQCENYEELADGAFKBAhNGAFKBAhBGABKBAhGGAFQAFgAYMgQaAFwAXgAgAEAiAEAkgEAmAEAyAENwAEB2gEGCAEQARgJ&sclient=gws-wiz

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Good Lord there's a lot of mystery data encoded into that!!! The essential part is:
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-e&q=youtube+grateful+dead+morning+dew
All the rest is presumably info specific to me and my search which could be used to ID me.

So, if the link is short and readable and makes sense, then it's probably safe to share. If the link is loaded with opaque strings, don't share it!

@BackyardShaman a web app's code base, and URL's, are two different concepts

Incidentally, this is a browser extension I wish everybody would use, to strip out all of those obnoxiously long (but harmless) marketing query strings from links typically shared on Twitter or facebook (?utm_blah_blah_blah ....)

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/neat-url/