Re: [council] #60: Firefox: Don't increase fingerprint by adding "Fedora" to user agent

#60: Firefox: Don't increase fingerprint by adding "Fedora" to user agent
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Reporter: genodeftest | Owner:
Status: new | Priority: minor
Component: General | Resolution:
Keywords: |
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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>
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