What does thay actually achieve though? You've still given an 'opened' hit, even if urlex expands it on the server instead of client-side (which would be truly useless).
You're disguising location and device information, but that's about it?
- The "hit" comes from the resolver rather than your own IP. So long as there's no referrer pass-through of personal information, your location is minimised.
- Such links often come through other social media, in my case, rather than email. In the specific case of email this practice is of little use in protecting privacy. However if you're sanitising links pulled off social media shares or the like, you're at least preventing downstream contamination.
- Another practice is to randomly scramble any visible identifiers. This presumes longer URLs, rather than shortened ones.
- In practice, I scrub any "utm-medium" or similar URI attributes as a matter of course. URLEX is helpful for expanding shortened links ... which I've not encountered so much in email, though truth be told, I've largely abandoned email for numerous reasons, the present topic included.
At the least, a log hit from a different IP, I suppose. They're right, I totally forgot to mention the unshortener services, which are what I actually mostly use my Python routine (shared upthread) on. It's largely for self-amusement, admittedly.
For the Google links, I actually use an extension to automatically restore the original URL links.
You're disguising location and device information, but that's about it?