A link to a rain jacket in a shop's newsletter often carries extra parts after the address: which newsletter you came from, which campaign, and sometimes an ID that is unique to your click. Share that link with a friend and those parts travel with it.
QR codes add a second problem. You cannot read one before you scan it, and a sticker over the real code looks just the same.
So we built CheckLink, the new app in
Stormberry (nprofile…pf5c) Labs.
Paste a link, share one into it from any app, or scan a QR code, and it shows what the link holds before anything is opened. The parts that tell Google, Meta, Amazon and others about your click are marked in red, each with who learns it and what it tells. Untick anything you want to keep, then copy or share the clean link.
For QR codes it says in plain words what the code holds. Payment requests are shown, never paid. When it finds nothing to point out, it says so, and reminds you that this does not prove a site is genuine.
One permission, the camera, only when you press Scan. No internet permission at all.
Free, no account, open source. Version 0.0.1, our first and early release.
Get it on Android through Zapstore (nprofile…gsu4)
https://zapstore.dev/apps/no.stormberry.checklink
The code: https://github.com/StormberryAS/CheckLink
#Stormberry #privacy #android #FOSS #Zapstore
