LinkedIn attaches tracking to almost every link that leaves it. Profile URLs pick up originalSubdomain, post URLs pick up utm_source and utm_medium, and internal navigation adds trk and lipi values that describe exactly where on the page you clicked.
Paste one of those into a document or an email and you are sending several hundred characters where fifty would do.
What a LinkedIn URL collects
A profile link copied from the address bar often looks like this:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/somebody-12345/?originalSubdomain=in
originalSubdomain records the country version of LinkedIn the viewer was using. Harmless, and unnecessary. The profile is fully identified by /in/somebody-12345/.
A post link shared through the Share button is worse:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/somebody_article-title-activity-7123456789012345678-Ab3C?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
Here utm_source=share and utm_medium=member_desktop describe how you shared, not what you shared.
Then there is trk, which is the one people notice least and which carries the most:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/example/?trk=public_profile_topcard-current-company
That value is a description of the exact element you clicked, in this case the current-company link on the top card of a public profile. LinkedIn also uses lipi, an identifier for the specific page instance you were on, and li_fat_id for its first-party advertising attribution.
The lnkd.in wrapper
Outbound links get wrapped. Post something with a link in it and LinkedIn rewrites it, so what your audience clicks is a lnkd.in short link or a linkedin.com/redir/redirect?url= redirect rather than your actual address.
The click is logged on the way through. This is the same pattern Facebook uses with l.facebook.com, described in what is fbclid.
There is a practical consequence beyond privacy. A wrapped link hides its destination, and plenty of corporate email filters treat unexpanded short links as suspicious. I have watched a perfectly ordinary link to a public blog post get quarantined because it arrived as a lnkd.in redirect inside an email. The clean URL went through immediately.
Why this matters more on LinkedIn than elsewhere
Most link sharing is casual. LinkedIn sharing usually is not. You are pasting a URL into a job application, a client email, a proposal, a CV.
A profile link ending in ?trk=public_profile_topcard-current-company tells the recipient, if they look, that you copied it while poking around somebody's public profile. It is not incriminating. It is just slightly unpolished in a context where polish is the entire point.
That is genuinely why I clean LinkedIn links more carefully than any other kind, and it has nothing to do with privacy. A bare linkedin.com/in/yourname in an email signature looks deliberate. The 180-character version looks like you did not check.
Cleaning them by hand
For a profile, keep everything up to and including the vanity name:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/somebody-12345/?originalSubdomain=in&trk=nav_responsive_tab_profile
https://www.linkedin.com/in/somebody-12345/
For a post, keep the path up to the activity identifier. That long string containing activity-7123456789012345678 is what identifies the post, so do not cut into it. Everything from the ? onward can go.
For a company page, keep /company/name/ and drop the rest.
For a lnkd.in link, there is nothing to edit. You have to open it and clean the address you land on, because the destination is not in the URL.
Doing it in one step
The url cleaner strips LinkedIn's parameters and leaves the identifying path intact. It is the faster option when the URL has several parameters and you are not certain which ones the page needs.
What to keep
originalSubdomain, trk, lipi, li_fat_id, midToken, midSig, refId and the UTM pair can all go.
Nothing in a LinkedIn query string is load bearing in normal use. The identifying information lives in the path, which is unusual among the platforms in this series and makes LinkedIn links relatively easy to clean by hand.
Related reading
UTM parameters explained covers utm_source=share and its siblings.
Every parameter in one table: the URL tracking parameter glossary.
Frequently asked questions
Will a cleaned LinkedIn link still work?
Yes. The path identifies the profile, post or company page on its own.
What is trk in a LinkedIn URL?
An internal tracking value describing which element on which page you clicked to get there.
Can I stop LinkedIn wrapping my links in lnkd.in?
Not for links posted on the platform. The wrapping happens on LinkedIn's side.
Is li_fat_id the same as fbclid?
Same idea, different company. It is LinkedIn's first-party advertising click identifier.