dslreports logo
 
    All Forums Hot Topics Gallery
spc
uniqs
97
OZO
Premium Member
join:2003-01-17

2 edits

1 recommendation

OZO to Cabal

Premium Member

to Cabal

Re: EFF: Tracking Browsers Without Cookies Or IP Addresses

Tracking users, based on UserAgent, is a relatively new trend. Silently, but surely companies, which are interested in that development, do it without user knowledge or consent. To make it better trackable, they add more and more info into UserAgent sting. Here is an example of very unique UserAgent stings that one of the actual browsers sends to every web site it visits:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; MS-RTC LM 8; OfficeLiveConnector.1.4; OfficeLivePatch.1.3; InfoPath.3)
And the worst thing is that the user doesn't know about it at all. All those sub-strings, making it so unique, were attached to the UserAgent silently by a company who pushes that new method of tracking... I'm sure that if user knew it - he'd look for a way to remove it all. But the problem is - no one can see it or even know that and what does it mean for their privacy...

This tendency (tracking users using UserAgent string) could be developed further or stopped. There is one thing for sure though - it could be stopped only by conscious users who cares about own privacy at least a bit. Without their actions it will only grows.

Here is the way how to remove all this trash from your IE7 browser.
Just remove the keys below from registry (or all values inside the keys):
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\User Agent\Post Platform]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\User Agent\Post Platform]

Watch for other "Post Platform" sub-keys too.

Removing those keys made my UserAgent sting look like it should be:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1)
You may compare it to the string that my browser wanted to send before the cure in my first post and you'll see the difference.

And BTW, this could be achieved without running any proxy.