See[1] the Referrer-Policy header, <meta name="referrer">, <a referrerpolicy> and <a rel="noreferrer">.

But generally, webmasters have found it useful to know who caused their server to fall over^W^W^W^W^W^W is linking to their pages. This was even used as a predecessor to pingbacks once upon a time, but turned out to be too spammable (yes, even more so than pingbacks).

After the HN operators started adding rel=noreferrer to links to the Asahi Linux website, Marcan responded[2] by excluding anyone who has the HN submit form in their browser history, which feels like a legitimate attack on the browser’s security model—I don’t know how it’d be possible to do that. (Cross-origin isolation is supposed to prevent cross-site tracking of this exact kind, and concerns about such privacy violations are why SRI has not been turned into a caching mechanism along the lines of Want-Content-Digest, and so on and so forth.) ETA: This is no longer in place, it seems.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re...

[2] https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110503331622393719

Referer does have legitimate uses. For example, back in the day people would use it to detect if someone embedded an image from their site on another site. SomethingAwful famously used to respond to any such requests with goatse, and forums I was on had very strict "don't link to SA images" rules as a result.

I think that using referer to try to deliver manifestos to users of another site is kinda childish, but so it goes. Every tool can be put to good or bad uses.

This is part of the web DNA. Pages linking pages and being aware about it. Origin can still disable it.

There is little hope to get it disabled when an ad company is running running the most popular ad platf... Erm, the world wide web browser.

There's a handy addon for Firefox called Privacy Settings that can take care of that. Explicitly adds and option to have the referers be not sent, and a quick way of re-enabling it, in case it breaks a website. Because of course that happens too.