Comment by godelski
8 hours ago
Easy to detect but companies are lazy. I remember when Netflix first worked for Linux on chrome but not Firefox. I changed my agent and was good to go. After some months I emailed them asking to lift the agent block. They assured me they weren't blocking by agent. I sent them screenshots. They doubled down. So I said ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and just kept using the agent until they unblocked it
Absolutely, but the parent was speaking about privacy. Access is a different story, because you can test different user agent strings, and immediately determine whether you get access. By contrast, you can't change a user agent string and readily determine whether or not you've broken someone's ability to track you.
My example of access is just a clearer example of laziness. Maybe they were tracking but it seems unlikely, right? If they were, why not block? Laziness is a much better explanation.
I can get feedback with access, I can't get feedback with tracking. That's why I mentioned access.
They probably weren't tracking you, that was probably a case of directing a user toward a supported browser for customer support purposes. I would imagine that was a requirement in somebody's Jira ticket, solved with a few lines of code.
By contrast, tracking people on the web is a multibillion dollar industry, and there are out of the box commercial libraries that do very sophisticated tracking. None of these solutions rely on user agent string alone.
The vast majority of websites by count are not doing anything sophisticated. But some are.
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