Started to get this message when accessing Reddit. I use LibreWolf as a browser, which does indeed provide a more generic user agent to combat fingerprinting, but nothing out of the ordinary either (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/119.0). Anyone else experiencing this?
Edit: seems to have resolved itself. Thanks for confirming I wasn’t doing anything wrong. Let’s hope this isn’t some new algorithm to test if for insufficient fingerprinting so Reddit can kick ad-resistant users.
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It’s also used to create a digital fingerprint so you can be tracked without downloading a cookie.
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It is one of dozens of things used to establish a unique fingerprint. Check this out, I bet you can be individually identified and tracked with nothing more than what your browser reveals, including the UA.
https://amiunique.org/
Reddit uses exactly this to enforce site bans so they can identify people that just change emails or even public ip addresses. It’s almost certainly used to create phantom profiles at hundreds of sites whether you make an account or not.
https://smartframe.io/blog/browser-fingerprinting-everything-you-need-to-know/
Not the person you’re replying to, but I would second what they’re saying. I recall many years ago reading a post from the Tor browser team explaining that they customise the UA and even browser window size to avoid fingerprinting. It’s not the UA alone, but that in combination with other values the site you’re visiting can detect.
User agent is also the very first thing checked on the below fingerprinting site. I was surprised to see that 0.00% of me have the same user agent as me!
https://www.amiunique.org/fingerprint
I guess you’ve never heard of JA3 fingerprints?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_fingerprint#Browser_fingerprint
Yeah I didn’t think disabling features for Firefox users would make sense. The user would have to know you’re punishing them for it to be effective at incentivising them to switch to chrome.
I personally don’t trust Google anyway and mainly just use duckduckgo.
I think that they probably made it so their app looks nicer and want chrome to match, anyway then there’s apps that just block you if you’re not using chromium or derivatives, despite working on the browser you’re using. Ahem Ms-teams and another video conferencing software that I had to use.