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 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

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Ticket URL: <https://fedorahosted.org/council/ticket/60#comment:3>
council <https://fedorahosted.org/council>
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