#60: Firefox: Don't increase fingerprint by adding "Fedora" to user agent -------------------------+-------------------- Reporter: genodeftest | Owner: Status: new | Priority: minor Component: General | Resolution: Keywords: | -------------------------+-------------------- Comment (by mattdm): I guess I have no strong feelings here either way. Or rather, I have strong feelings on the theoreticals, but they're basically canceled out by the practicals. On the one hand, I'm in support of user privacy, and part of Fedora's vision statement is "people control their content and devices" — and it's a reasonable argument that privacy concerns like this one fall under that. But, as a practical matter as noted in bug #1190774, there's so much leaking out of Firefox and Fedora in general that it seems odd to fixate on this one thing. Fingerprinting via plugins and fonts are already likely to be more specific for tracking, and probably can be used by malicious actors to identify Fedora systems with high confidence anyway. On the other hand, the goal of having a better picture of Fedora desktop use in the wild *is* strategically valuable; it's hard to improve what you can't measure, and we can't get to our vision at all if the project doesn't succeed. (If Fedora is ultra-private and no one is using it, that's not really a win!) But, as a practical matter *there*, the primary place where the user agent was going to be useful was in large third-party sites like Wikipedia disclosing their user agent count information. Wikipedia doesn't do that anymore. We can count on our *own* sites, but that isn't much value. So, without a good source of actual measurable information, eh, it's not buying us much. So, yeah: there's two strong, opposing theoretical points. But, practically, I don't think it really makes much difference either way. -- Ticket URL: <https://fedorahosted.org/council/ticket/60#comment:1> council <https://fedorahosted.org/council> Fedora Council Public Tickets _______________________________________________ council-discuss mailing list council-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct https://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/council-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx The Fedora Project's mission is to lead the advancement of free and open source software and content as a collaborative community.
