Bug 228831

Summary:	support eff campaign against browser finger printing by changing default values
Product:	[Applications] konqueror	Reporter:	m.wege
Component:	general	Assignee:	Konqueror Developers <konq-bugs>
Status:	RESOLVED WORKSFORME
Severity:	wishlist	CC:	germain, zahl
Priority:	NOR
Version:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	unspecified
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description m.wege 2010-02-28 00:32:38 UTC

Version:           4.4.00 (KDE 4.4.0) (using 4.4.00 (KDE 4.4.0), Kubuntu packages)
Compiler:          cc
OS:                Linux (i686) release 2.6.31-20-generic

I would like to suggest to change the default values of Konquerors and rekonqs user agent string to something makes browser finger printing more difficult. Currently the EFF has a campaign against this method of tracking users by their user agent string. Since Konqueror and Rekonq are not used very often it is even easier to track users with the standard settings. I believe even the KDE version (accept of may that it is the KDE4 series) is not so important, since no one will really care to create different pages for differrent versions of the browsers. The only interest may be for statistical reasons of KDE and the distros (I trust they would not misuse this data for tracking). So for those pages there could be exceptions added, if this is needed.

BTW: Could someone assign this bug to rekonq too? I believe only one report is necessary, since a shared setting would make sense.

Comment 1 Maksim Orlovich 2010-02-28 01:26:13 UTC

Not going to happen. We have a hard enough fight against the web oligopoly without making us any more invisible.

Comment 2 m.wege 2010-02-28 02:31:45 UTC

Did I write to remove Konqueror or khtml as such? I just mean there should not be any pointing to which KDE version, kernel version, OS. How would this make Konqueror invisible? Differentiating between different versions is something which at this point would only make sense for KDE and distro pages for their own statistics.
If you assume that this bug is still a wont fix, please reassign it to Rekonq, may be they consider it.

Comment 3 Germain Garand 2010-02-28 03:30:20 UTC

well, given that we already default to not adding anything specific except for the operating system string (without version information), I understood the same as Maksim, that you wanted to go for the rest of it :-)

So that's rather a WORKSFORME, I believe :

../kio/kio/http_slave_defaults.h:#define DEFAULT_USER_AGENT_KEYS  "o" // Show OS

Comment 4 A. Spehr 2010-03-18 23:22:36 UTC

As Germain said, WFM. 

And if you don't wish to be counted in browser statistics as using KDE, then you can always use the User-Agent changing plugin to clock as internet explorer.