In the context of e-safety a large part of staying safe online and protecting your data is knowing what you are clicking on. For good reason, many people use URL shorteners such as that from Google, bit.ly and many others. If you don’t know what a shortened URL is, here’s an example:
In a traditional, full URL, it would actually look like this:
https://www.esafety-adviser.com/blog/e-safety-inspection-changes-apr-13-to-sept-13/
These URL shorteners are particularly useful if you are posting/sharing links on social networking sites such as Twitter in order to reduce the character count.
But, how do you know what you are clicking on? How do you know the URL is appropriate (adult/child) or spam?
The easiest way I’ve found is a website (also an iOS and Android app) which deciphers the shortened URL for you. Called unfurlr, this is how it works:
Copy the shortened URL and paste it into unfurlr
Press “Check It” and below you will get a deciphered version of the URL so you can see what it actually is:
Also, below that you will get a status check on the actual website.
A very useful e-safety tool and thanks go out to the developers, Mailchimp for making it freely available.
Of course, the number one e-safety tip is obvious – if you don’t know or don’t trust the source, don’t click on it.