Re: User Agent string: making it more specific?

[wmperry@aventail.com (William M. Perry)]

Florian Weimer <fw@s.netic.de> writes:

> Arcady Genkin <a.genkin@utoronto.ca> writes:
> 
> > Although I would vote against including more stuff in User-agent, I
> > don't understand how it would be any more breach of privacy than
> > including Gnus and Emacs versions. Comments?
> 
> I don't want people to know that I'm actually running Windows 2000,
> you know.

This is why Emacs/W3 has a paranoia setting that you can tweak:

-----------
url-privacy-level's value is 
(email)


Documentation:
*How private you want your requests to be.
HTTP/1.0 has header fields for various information about the user, including
operating system information, email addresses, the last page you visited, etc.
This variable controls how much of this information is sent.

This should a symbol or a list.
Valid values if a symbol are:
none     -- Send all information
low      -- Don't send the last location
high     -- Don't send the email address or last location
paranoid -- Don't send anything

If a list, this should be a list of symbols of what NOT to send.
Valid symbols are:
email    -- the email address
os       -- the operating system info
lastloc  -- the last location
agent    -- Do not send the User-Agent string
cookie   -- never accept HTTP cookies

Samples:

 (setq url-privacy-level 'high)
 (setq url-privacy-level '(email lastloc))    ;; equivalent to 'high
 (setq url-privacy-level '(os))

::NOTE::
This variable controls several other variables and is _NOT_ automatically
updated.  Call the function `url-setup-privacy-info' after modifying this
variable.

You can customize this variable.
-----------

Perhaps gnus should have something similar.

> Just kidding.

Suuuure.