#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 smooge): I agree with Matthew that if people are focused on privacy for their usage, the user-agent string is not the place to focus on. 1. Most analytical tools are much more sophisticated than they were 4 years ago via javascript, fonts, page response time, and other factors to pinpoint what a person is using. 2. We aren't the only distribution putting in a branding for their usage. Ubuntu and Android (who have the lion share of Linux usage) have put in their brands for years. Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:33.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/33.0 Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.96 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Arch Linux i686; rv:2.0) Gecko/20110321 Firefox/4.0 Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.0.7) Gecko/2009031915 Gentoo Firefox/3.0.7 Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux amd64; rv:5.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/5.0 (Debian) * I will point out that the last three are clearly old versions when distros were putting strings in at one point. This was dropped at some point as a trend, and the trend is going the other way. 3. Many other packages have leaked data about usage for years. [ x86_64 -redhat-linux-gnu ] Various other browsers have been branded for years. My main point is that not having a user-agent string stands out as much as having one. Just having the Linux in it says you are ~2% of the population. Not having the Ubuntu string says you are of a 20-40% of the Linux user space. If you aren't using various privacy enhancing tools you can be quickly fingerprinted further down. But on the other hand if you are using many privacy tools you are also fingerprinted because not having data like the vast majority of users makes you stand out. So if we are really wanting to enhance privacy we need to make our user agent string: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko -- Ticket URL: <https://fedorahosted.org/council/ticket/60#comment:3> 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.
