Dark social media

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages) This article's lead section contains information that is not included elsewhere in the article. If the information is appropriate for the lead of the article, this information should also be included in the body of the article. (October 2023) (Learn how and when to remove this message) This article's factual accuracy may be compromised due to out-of-date information. The reason given is: The article is somewhat outdated yet refers to today's web services, and is written from a somewhat partial perspective which assumes that marketers have every right to track their users/visitors. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information. (January 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Dark social media, dark social, or dark traffic are terms coined by the online marketing and advertising community to refer to social sharing of URLs that do not contain any digital referral (i.e. tracking) information about the source.^[1][2] The concept of a "dark" link is generally used by people working in web analytics as well as in online advertising, who have come to expect that they will be able to monitor and profile website visitors and app users, sometimes in quite controversial ways such as mouse tracking to follow people's activities by tracking their mouse movements.

Privacy advocates would typically refer to a URL without tracking information as a clean URL, i.e. one which simply takes the user to the requested web page or resource. Some technology providers have made these privacy-enhancing technologies a particular focus of their operating system^[3] and web browser applications.^[4] Legislation such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation and Digital Markets Act specifically targets this surveillance capitalism approach to providing Internet products and services. To protect user privacy, the browser Mozilla Firefox added a feature to "Copy Without Site Tracking" for the dropdown menu when right-clicking its address bar.