this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2024
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[โ€“] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Trick is I took out the actually useful parts like Chrome, Firefox, Edge, etc. And the OS. All the agents these days have AppleWebKit and Mozilla just so old websites that look for it don't downgrade the experience.

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

Yeah, make your user agent absolutely unique. Too much entropy will surely confuse the shit out server side HTTP Header tracking. ๐Ÿ˜ฌ

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Oh gee, I wasn't aware there was more to it than the UA. Thanks for opening my eyes.

Edit: I checked your link, most of the parameters on the test require client side execution. That (client side tracking) is absolutely unrelated to what (server side tracking) I was talking about, and is something you can control (by not allowing JavaScript, for example). Please do not confuse the two. There is literally nothing you can do against server side tracking.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yeah this isn't my UA but I'm just saying these parts are what's considered the supported featureset rather than information about what software the device is running.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Yes, I get that point, but I also think that it's tempting for the privacy-minded novice to think "the less information I provide, the better!", while in actuality, it is better to provide "more" information: the most common UA, even if it means lying about your featureset. In this case, truly, more is less.

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

Firefox doesn't pretend to use AppleWebKit. It's actually the only one which identifies itself correctly... mostly, at least:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:122.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/122.0

While about:support says "Window Protocol: wayland". But that's ok websites shouldn't care anyway.

It's other browsers who send things like "like Gecko" to sneak past old browser-detection code.