I am making a site with privacy as one of its main topics. Subsequently, we want to make privacy a concern, by minimizing privacy violations for visitors of my site. (In this crazy world that is the best we can do, minimize). We need to add social media buttons (intent buttons like tweet intent) so visitors can share articles with others. Simply not placing those buttons at all is not an option, no one converts the world by ignoring everything which doesn't fit in their ideals. We simply do need ways to for people to share articles. But how might I minimize the impact of adding social media buttons to our website?
For the icons and fonts we only use self hosted sources. But of course the URL in that share button will point to the domain of a social media platform. As a webmaster, is there anything more I can do to prevent prefetching of the URL?
Of course the browser eventually makes the decision to prefetch or not, but how can I discourage that browser to the best of my abilities?
One idea we have is to point all social media buttons to one specialized page within our own site, which than redirects from there to the external site. The idea would be that the external site would always get called from the same page, and thus would not be prefeteched by visitors whom never pressed the share button. Would that actually help, or do browsers prefetch that external page anyway? Would redirecting like that have significant downsides?
So what options do I have to protect visitors of my website against tracking, without significantly limiting the impact my website can have? (assuming prefetching is the main concern when it comes to tracking)
