birdsarah
commented
5 years ago I'm merging this.
We could get more precise, although as I started to I realized some gaps in my own knowledge which I don't have time to refresh right now. But here are a few bullet point thoughts:
- In this dataset we're referring to the string returned by the browser from calling the API
window.navigator.userAgent(https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/NavigatorID/userAgent). However, there's also the User-Agent header. It's not precisely clear to me how these relate to each other and whether they can be changed independently. - With the above caveat, the user agent string can be altered:
- The TOR browser sets it's userAgent to be the most common and reduce fingerprinting entropy - https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#fingerprinting-linkability
- bots and other things change their user agent in a process called "spoofing" to work around restrictions
- Additional resources (If we can link to a more authoritative source than Wikipedia i prefer to - while it's where i often start my hunts for info, it's subject to change and vandalism): https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/User-Agent, https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/NavigatorID/userAgent
(Inserted alphabetically)