The extension does what is advertised, it removes the encoded link, but as another reviewer said, this is far from enough to stop them from tracking you. The encoded link is actually a fallback option for when javascript is disabled. It's definitely annoying when you're trying to copy a link to a pdf into an email from the phone browser. Without going into a ton of details about how javascript works, just know that when you click a link between that click and the load of the next page, a bunch of functions called EventListeners are called provided they are attached to the clicked element.

And, yes, they are attached... on every site that has google analytics. So... pretty much every site. Unless it's part of their corporate image to be non-tracking, the website has google analytics. (As far as project managers are concerned, it's more important you have analytics working on a site than it is for the site itself to be working - their managers rate their performance based almost entirely on how that graph looks.)

If you want to get rid of all that tracking, it's best to nip it at the source. Block all google analytics entirely using a plugin like uMatrix (watch a video how to use it, it's a little more complex than the average addon - but even a boomer should be able to master it in 15 minutes.). Now if you're on google running javascript, that's still not going to be enough to ensure you're not tracked, but on other sites it will provided that site doesn't make use of any of the other free google products [1]. And why do they make them? The idea is that they can follow you everywhere you go on the internet and collect the data. It's difficult to imagine a data set this large and complex. We probably cannot.

Now I could speculate all day long on what evil plans google has for this data. They could use it to evolve artificial intelligence to replace us. [2] But that's not their main money machine is it? No it's totally used for advertisement delivery. come on, you know that. and google doesn't have a dept dedicated to calling the police on people who look at drug stuff, so you don't really need to worry about that. [3]

Nope just ad delivery. And at leat they give you something for it. free photo storage forever -- when forever is 20 years -- i mean, free email, free better than ms office office software. It's a lot better than facebook, now that's a company with evil plans for your data. Their main function is a simple AI that uses a variable-ratio reinforcement schedule [4] to get people addicted to scrolling facebook. They show you a bunch of nothing and then as your about to set the phone down, and there's and article about that thing that you've been so excited to read about... or blah blah... don't care... blah blah... oh look another one of your childhood friends is dead in their 30s, I bet you'll pay attention to that. Don't delete facebook, you'll lose touch with the ones that are left.

Well, look at the bright side, what are the odds you would have been born into the generation that got to see the extinction level event that ended humanity? 500 thousand years is a pretty good run. What's really wild is that we managed to burn up half the oil that took 600 million years of plants and animals living and dying and decomposing into it to create. In 150 years? 150/600,000,000 reduce 1.5/6,000,000... 1/4,500,000 oh right half... 1/2,250,000. It took 2.25 million years to form all the oil we use in an average year. wow. pretty impressive. those kids with the 1 gram dabs on youtube don't seem so obscene when you put it in that context. well, we gotta drive and air condition the tropics. i mean, how could we live otherwise?

---------------------------------------------------------

[1] Recaptcha, fonts, maps, tag manager, people, perspective comment analyzer, proximity beacon, knowledge graph search api... the list goes on there's like 100 of them.

[2] Given the state of our planet, isn't it near 420ppm CO2 now?... blaze it? - or like take your last puff of air and watch the atmosphere literally blow off into space when the heat energy distrupts the balance that holds it there - that's probably how most of us are going out. I give it 10-20 years, but that's another discussion. my point is, the robots will survive, so if we want to at least preserve all the art and science and stuff we made, then we should probably let google train their ai with our data.

[3] Although, they do seem to have a department of move the harm reduction stuff way way down in the rankings though - we don't want iv drug users learning to use in a way that won't give them infections and diseases now. and we certainly don't want people learning how to check for fentanyl in their drugs. there's nothing like unprecedented death rates for my generation to bring back that drug war fighting spirit. it almost looked like that was gonna turn vietnam and lose public support, but then out of nowhere drug dealers started just killing their customers... I guess for the thrill of it. Right.

[4] There are 4 reinforcement schedules defined by Behaviorism. Fixed Interval(FI), Fixed Ratio (FR), Variable Interval (VI) and Variable Ratio (VR). Variable schedules tend to perform better than fixed. "Pigeons' pecks on one key produced a stimulus correlated with a mixed‐ratio schedule of food reinforcement. Pecks on a second key produced a stimulus correlated with a fixed‐ratio schedule. When the arithmetic mean of the mixed ratios equaled the fixed ratio, the former stimulus maintained a higher rate of pecking." (Fantino, 1957) And ratio schedules tend to perform better than interval schedules "It was found that when rates of reinforcement were equal in the two components, the rate of response in the variable‐ratio component was nearly twice that in the variable‐interval component. Furthermore, for three of the four subjects, the function relating response rate to relative rate of reinforcement in the variable‐ratio component had a slope 2.5 to 3 times the slope of the corresponding function for the variable‐interval component." (Zuriff, 1970)