(because the last one was private)
Are you interested in protecting your #privacy and/or fucking with advertisers, and use #chrome or #firefox?
Check out my extension RandomUA, which randomizes your User-Agent header for each request in a way that preserves compatibility but really mucks up tracking.
Learn more at https://leotindall.com/randomua/
#GPL #GPLv3 #OpenSource #WebExtension
Please boost and send me comments on what features you'd like to see!
@mno Because it's random, that will happen sometimes. You should be able to just refresh the page and it will work. I'll try to address it in a future update.
@tindall well, since refreshing it and hoping for a nice value to pop-up is annoying, is there any way for me to manually change my UA settings? if I turn off the extension my browser doesn't update it automatically to what it was before
@mno Not at the moment. I think I know a way to fix your issue, though; I'll push an update momentarily.
@tindall thank you!
@mno You're welcome!
It's in the queue to be approved. Hopefully this should fix your issue for now; I'm working on an options panel that will allow you to disable the extension for certain websites.
@tindall update just came in for me and it's working! thanks again for the quick fix!!
@mno Absolutely! I live to serve my users :P
@tindall does this work on mobile?
@confusedcharlot Yep, at least in Firefox Nightly. I haven't tested it on stable.
@tindall what are the minimum required FF / Chrome/ium versions for this?
Love the idea, can't wait to try when I'm in my "try new stuff" space.
@tindall often with these randomizers, the biggest fear I have is the sites where i purchase stuff from or pay my bills in are not able to track if am the same entity being sent to the payment gateway. am not sure if ua is part of their consideration but it's been a really bad experience.
@dpreacher they should use cookies for that, which are actually reliable
@dpreacher yes, whitelisting is definitely in the works :)
@tindall usually buying stuff can be retried. But stuff like booking a seat going somewhere and there are limited seats and absolute rush to get preferred seat, there are no second chances if the browser can't send through the data to the pg reliably. So it's not a very happy thing nor is it ever taken lightly.
@dpreacher right, which is why they use cookies in that situation. I've never seen a site that relied on passive fingerprinting for something that important
@tindall Hey, good work! The thing I would recommend is writing a good non-technical description of what the extension does so more people understand what it is and why it is useful. Also, upload some nice screenshots, that gives people confidence that they are not installing something harmful. Finally, there is a console.log in the .js file. Should that be there? I installed the extension on Chrome and it seems like it does not log anything.
@damaru Re: the console.log statement, it logs to the browser console, not the general dev console; it's useful if people want to see what they're masquerading as.
Re: screenshots, that's a good idea; those are in the works for 0.2 which should be coming out in about twenty minutes. Thanks for the suggestions!
@tindall Is UA really all that big a part of the fingerprint? I thought it didn't account for much entropy.
@varx It doesn't account for that much, but changing it does change your fingerprint value, and when combined with other techniques is pretty effective.
@tindall I guess if they rely on it as a stable part of the fingerprint, that could help.
@tindall That's great because data theft is frequent... https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Données_personnelles
I think a one website/session would be way better, otherwise with the help of cookies and stuff you would actually be seen as someone that is often changing their user-agent.
@tindall this is cool! unfortunately I can't use it in firefox because it trips up gmail, which says my browser is unsupported. I can use the basic html view fine but... it's just too unplesant to look at.
https://chitter.xyz/media/Os0IbqV8XMTSHTw4-qc