[godelski]

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

[kube-system]

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.

[godelski]

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.

[kube-system]

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.

[godelski]

The announcement came with the claim about DRM. So I believe there was some "legal" issue about it. I'm also sure they didn't actually care that much.

  > By contrast, tracking people on the web is a multibillion dollar industry

Of which Netflix is a part of.

  > The vast majority of websites by count are not doing anything sophisticated. But some are.

And this is my point. Somewhere like fingerprint.com is trying to use all the tools available. But most places aren't. Facebook and Google? Sure, I buy that. But mentioning that many places are lazy is not the same thing. It is a game where we can't win completely and we still need to let people know that small gains are still meaningful. A major problem we face with privacy is that people feel so powerless that it is useless to fight back. But that's not true. Just because your bulletproof vest doesn't stop a missile doesn't make it useful. A bulletproof vest that only stops small caliber is still better than no vest, since most shots are small caliber. Pareto is still alive and well here.

[kube-system]

Yes, there are plugins (e.g. widevine) that do DRM and they have/had varying browser/os compatibility.

But ultimately, Netflix is just trying to check a box in their contractual obligations, and/or prevent high-schoolers with chrome dev tools from sending movies to all their friends. They're not really interested in spending large sums of money to figure out your browsing history. It's just not relevant to their revenue stream.

>> tracking people on the web is a multibillion dollar industry

> Of which Netflix is a part of.

I was referring to businesses that do web activity tracking as their primary business. Facebook and Google's primary business is advertising, which isn't the same thing, and they control enough products that they don't actually have to do very much fingerprinting in order to target ads effectively. Most of their data, people voluntarily hand over. I was getting more at the big ecosystem of commercial tools that others can implement that do these sorts of things. e.g fingerprint.com and many others.