Former Title before conversion to Feature Request topic:
Why doesn’t Brave randomize the user agent?
My UA is extremely unique (less than 0.01%). I am testing Brave’s fingerprint etc, considering moving all my browsing activities over to Brave (mainly because i like the ethos of the company and its dedication to fighting tracking).
However I am on a pretty rare OS (older version of Mac OSX, I won’t use newer ones due to the massive amount of telemetry, will leave for Linux before I do that) - so surely my fingerprint is being made VERY unique due to my UA reporting my OS, not to mention other info.
With all the hard work done by Brave to defend against fingerprinting browsers, why doesnt the browser adjust/randomize/spoof the UA?
Not sure I understand. To help ‘others’ see what issue?
Is there an issue? I am asking why Brave doesn’t randomize the useragent, i tried the links and didn’t see any explanation there.
Appreciate your time responding, not keen on your use of the word “paranoid” though, no offence taken as I am sure you meant none (but it’s important for average people to understand that seeking personal privacy and avoiding invasions of that privacy, is certainly not ‘irrational’, I’d argue it’s irrational for someone to close the curtains in the evening, yet not care at all about their entire digital footprint being recorded and tracked to use against them, even if only to extract more money from them.)
I used to use random user agent extension in Firefox. I moved to Brave to go without extensions due to the browser fingerprint they produce, so that’s no use here.
Back to the question then, if anyone can answer why the choice was made not to spoof/randomize the user agent, I’d love to know.
“Randomising useragent” could see issues on some older sites, and not really improve privacy. Overall the industry is moving away from user agents, there could be a time where browsers don’t have it.
Thanks. I think this may be slightly subjective. For me (maybe not most), my useragent string is a big giveaway when combined with all other fingerprintable data. I use a very old version of OSX (and have to), so no matter what I do to reduce my fingerprint, this sticks out like a sore thumb.
If it were no longer used, fine, but it is, and in some cases (like mine) it’s a dead simple adjustment which could greatly reduce my ‘fingerprintability’.
Even if I could just manually insert mine, that would be fine and dandy, as I could put the more common versions in of my OS and blend in with majority instead of 0.03% of population just on my OS choice!!
(but it’s important for average people to understand that seeking personal privacy and avoiding invasions of that privacy, is certainly not ‘irrational’, I’d argue it’s irrational for someone to close the curtains in the evening, yet not care at all about their entire digital footprint being recorded and tracked to use against them, even if only to extract more money from them.)