Dark social media

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. 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 and web browser applications. 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.

Defining "Dark Social"

Unlike sharing on a public social networking service like Facebook, dark social occurs privately through IRC channels, emails, SMS, or simply through copy-and-paste and other forms of private sharing. Not to confuse with deep web, dark social media is not about the content but the traffic of online sharing.