It’s important to differentiate private versus public ICS links. Private links are URLs generated by ICS and used on ICS controlled media. This includes emails or direct communications. Public links are URLs generated by ICS but used on uncontrolled media. These are invite links that are shared on personal messages, social media, or any other form of communication. Private links usually directly provided by ICS to the end user so the chance for data loss is negligible. With public links, there is a potential for data to be lost or tampered with during transmission.
In order to secure this data, we compress it into a short URL using a shortening service called short.io. This condenses our long URL into a drastically shorter and easy to remember URL. Here is an example:
would simply become:
ice.social/123abc
This keeps the data safer because it is not able to be directly modified in public contexts. You can think of the short URL as a key to get the real URL. If this shortened URL is tampered with in anyway, the key will not work and the URL will not be found. The user will be redirected to a message saying that their link is not valid and to double check they copied it correctly. A shortened link is not necessary for private links but they could receive the same benefits. The only downside is that it might pollute our analytics so it may be better to keep them longer.