• Einar@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    9
    ·
    3 months ago

    How do I hide which OS I am using? What is behind the high Unknown number?

    • Agility0971@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      17
      ·
      3 months ago

      Use user agent switcher and set it to something random. However that makes your fingerprint unique. I’ve read that people set it to windows just to blend in the masses

    • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      3 months ago

      Every browser has a description like "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 8.1.0; SM-T580) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/74.0.3729.157 Safari/537.36" called User Agent. You can set this value to something else, but be careful. If you set it to something that does not exist, then it makes it more likely to be identifiable. Or some things could potentially not work right if it expects a specific operating system, in example when downloading files. Usually not a big deal.

      So ultimately you want to set this value to something that exist and something that is used by many people. There are addons which can make this process much easier or even change it automatically after some time period in example.

      Chameleon at https://sereneblue.github.io/chameleon/ is such an addon for the browser. There are lot of other alternatives, I used a few of them in the past, but stopped using them because there was here and there trouble. If you do, I recommend to install this addon from the addon store of your browser and not from the website, but that is just my personal recommendation.

      • Einar@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        edit-2
        3 months ago

        Thanks. So what is measured is merely the browsers people are using? Then I can see why the metrics are more general ballparks than precise measurements, seeing that the user agent can be modified with ease.

        • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          3 months ago

          The question is, if they only evaluate the User Agent? This is an organization specialized into statistics, they know it can be modified too. The ad industry tries to track you and find out everything about you despite these modifications. Don’t underestimate them!

          • Einar@lemm.ee
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            4
            ·
            3 months ago

            Fair enough. They still don’t know what >7% of people are using, though.

            • GoodEye8@lemm.ee
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              5
              ·
              3 months ago

              That 7% might not even be people. It could be bots doing HTTP requests and throwing garbage in the user-agent.