Org-level Link Hygiene Engine

Your teammate just forwarded a customer support ticket to Slack. Clean URL, helpful context, problem solved.

Except buried in that link was utm_source=intercom&utm_campaign=support_q3&fbclid=IwAR2X...
— and now Facebook knows your helpdesk software, your campaign structure, and that someone from your support team clicked through at 2:47pm EST.

That long tail of junk isn't decoration. UTM parameters were literally designed to identify campaigns and attribute sessions in analytics tooling. Click identifiers like Google's gclid exist specifically for ad tracking and attribution.

Most organizations accidentally export metadata through the one thing everyone does constantly — sharing URLs. Pasted links in Slack become data leaks. Ticket URLs in Zendesk leave trails. Calendar invites with Zoom parameter strings expose internal context. In regulated industries like healthcare, finance, HR, and education, those tiny leaks compound into audit nightmares.

The market just proved this matters. Hospital websites are ground zero: a 2024 study found third-party tracking on 98.6% of hospital sites, with Meta pixels and Google trackers specifically flagged as creating legal exposure. In the past two years:

NewYork-Presbyterian paid $300,000 to New York's AG for website tracking that captured patient searches for doctors and appointments
Novant Health settled a $6.6M class action over pixel tracking on its patient portal
The FTC hit GoodRx with penalties for sharing health data with advertisers through tracking mechanisms
One-third of healthcare websites still use Meta's pixel tracking code despite mounting legal risk

HHS OCR's guidance on online tracking under HIPAA faced legal challenges and partial vacation, but that didn't stop the bleeding. Regulators and plaintiffs' attorneys established a new principle: invisible tracking and metadata flows can be treated as improper disclosure of sensitive data. The enforcement environment isn't theoretical anymore.

Privacy enforcement moved from "don't be evil" to "can you prove you weren't careless?" Links are where carelessness lives — and where regulators are looking.

The opportunity: a link firewall that runs on autopilot

Build a lightweight utility that cleans URLs the moment they hit your clipboard:

Core engine:

Strip known tracking parameters (UTM codes, click identifiers like fbclid and gclid, session tokens)
Preserve functional parameters (because breaking YouTube timestamps or Amazon product IDs defeats the purpose)
Optionally unshorten links to reveal the true destination before anyone clicks
Do it silently in the background with a simple undo option

This tech already exists. Multiple utilities handle it: Link Cleaner, URL Clean, browser extensions, even Alfred workflows. The technology is proven. The demand is real.

The wedge: make privacy a tiny daily habit instead of a policy PDF. The product rides on existing behavior — people copy links constantly — so there's no adoption friction. Users don't change workflows. You invisibly protect what they already do.

The consumer tool is pure distribution. The actual product is CleanLink for Teams — a compliance layer that enforces link hygiene across an organization.