chris124567 / chris124567.github.io

Spoofing a browser's user agent is often hailed as a privacy enhancing technique. On the Chrome Store, there are dozens of extensions allowing you to switch your user agent. Unfortunately, due to the abundance of other methods to detect browser and operating system information (as will be discussed in this article), these extensions do not meaningfully enhance privacy. There are some other reasons to change a browser's user agent, for example to test the mobile version of a website, or to bypass rate limits while scraping. Bot detection and fingerprinting vendors like Distil Networks, Imperva, WhiteOps, etc are all getting smarter about detecting this kind of spoofing. This post will reveal some of the techniques they use and illustrate the futility of many of these browser extensions.

In computing, a user agent is any software, acting on behalf of a user, which "retrieves, renders and facilitates end-user interaction with Web content."

Leave a Comment