Google Chrome User-Agent Extension

[Christian Schaller]

I talked to the Wikipedia sysadmin some time ago and there is a plan
to switch to a new system which should be kept up to date more regularly.

In general I think the browser vendors response to concerns about the
user agent is to suggest using incognito mode.

Christian



----- Original Message -----
> From: "Michael Catanzaro" <mcatanzaro at gnome.org>
> To: desktop at lists.fedoraproject.org
> Sent: Monday, September 28, 2015 11:39:31 AM
> Subject: Re: Google Chrome User-Agent Extension
> 
> On Mon, 2015-09-28 at 10:42 -0400, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
> > This bug was just brought to my attention:
> > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1266569
> > 
> > It appears that this extension is now installed by default on the
> > Fedora Workstation release. I don't personally have a problem with
> > this, but could someone please point me to where the decision was
> > made
> > and discussed so I can update the BZ and close it out?
> 
> 
> It's to allow sites to collect of statistics on the number of Fedora
> users, in particular Wikimedia [1]. (But notice the big red warning at
> the top of the page, about that report not being maintained. I wonder
> if we are still using this or not.) Note that for Firefox and
> WebKitGTK+, we simply used patches rather than browser extensions.
> 
> The disadvantage is that it does of course make your browser
> fingerprint more unique, which caused me to hesitate at first, but I
> think the privacy concerns are quite minimal. Servers already know
> you're using non-Ubuntu Linux, which is a very, very small class of
> users. [2] is very likely to show that your browser fingerprint is
> unique (or almost unique) with or without Fedora in the user agent. And
> none of that matters, because sites can use several forms of
> supercookies (e.g. using HSTS database abuse, or using IndexedDB;
> probably also with WebSQL or localstorage, not sure) to identify you
> uniquely irrespective of any of this. The only possibly-significant
> harm is that it informs the server that you're using Fedora rather than
> some other distro. We can debate whether that should be kept private by
> default, but I don't think so. :)
> 
> [1] https://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOperatingSy
> stems.htm
> [2] https://panopticlick.eff.org
> 
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