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WICG / ua-client-hints

Wouldn't it be nice if `User-Agent` was a (set of) client hints?
https://wicg.github.io/ua-client-hints/
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Does not respect people’s preference choices #130

Open jwrosewell opened 4 years ago

jwrosewell commented 4 years ago

As the primary constituent on the web people should be free to decide how they wish their agent (the user agent) to implement their wishes.

If the existing de facto standard of interoperability associated with the communication of user agent information is removed and replaced with this proposal, then people will no longer have the option to benefit from the performance and optimisation improvements available today. Society will similarly be disadvantaged by the removal of information important to the identification of fraud.

More work is needed to amend the proposal to ensure it does not limit choice. This is especially important given the dominant market position of the proposer’s employer, that their employers have access to the information that is seeking to be limited by the proposal, and that significant work will be required by all content authors to migrate to the proposed solution.

The IWA BG are proposing a session to debate these issues.

See this pull request which incorporates experiment feedback and review from interested users and other stakeholders for proposed text changes.

yoavweiss commented 3 years ago

Can you provide concrete examples of browser features or configurations around user choice that will not be possible with this proposal implemented?

jwrosewell commented 3 years ago

Large bodies of data are needed to indentify fraudulent activity on on-line. Doing this automatically reduces the need for people to verify they are human in other ways. If this change reduces the information available to fraud detection algorithms that need this information for this purpose then people will be "hassled" more often to prove they are human. This will generate friction for people.

Large organisations that rely less on such data will be able to maintain frictionless fraud detection. Small organisations offerings will be degrade, poetntially disasterously so as people turn away for the now poorer user experience. People therefore should have a choice over what to provide with the status quo maintained until a viable and widely implemented - both in web browsers and web publishers - alternative is available.

Another example relates to analytics. It's not clear if these features are all available to domains that provide services to web pages from domains other than the one displayed in the location address bar. If these features are not available to those domains by default then web site operators analytics services will be degraded. This will impact their ability to improve their services and this disadvantage people.

I'm happy to discuss this further on the call later.