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A comment on Chrome extension to randomize your User Agent (Underpants).

Re:Chrome extension to randomize your User Agent (Underpants) by z0r on Monday April 23, 2012 @04:10PM (#3880701)
If you give yourself the user agent of a terrible browser such as IE5, or if you give yourself the user agent of a less popular web crawler, a lot of companies won't bother to track your identity as it would be considered a waste of resources. I'm speaking as the minion of a company that deals in such things - for instance, my company won't track you for advertising purposes if you are running Linux. No profit in it!
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Re:Chrome extension to randomize your User Agent (Underpants) by xcallmejudasx on Monday April 23, 2012 @04:46PM (#3880888)
What happens if I use Linux while browsing at home and Windows while browsing at work? How does your company handle this? I can see a couple different scenarios and am curious which is closest to practice.

1) Track data while at work. Display only at work. 2) Track data while at work. Display at home and work. 3) Track data at home and work. Display at work 4) Don't track data at all.

Of course there's a few cases I missed but from what you said I don't see the reason they'd track me at home and display at work or any other various combinations excluded.

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Re:Chrome extension to randomize your User Agent (Underpants) by aslewofmice on Monday April 23, 2012 @05:04PM (#3880969)
Do you work from home using the same IP?

If I understand your question correctly, the answer would be 1. In most cases, they're doing cookie based tracking and you wouldn't have any crossover unless it was site specific retargetting and you've logged into an account on both platforms. If there's any crossover, its because you have the same browsing behaviors on both platforms.

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Re:Chrome extension to randomize your User Agent (Underpants) by xcallmejudasx on Wednesday April 25, 2012 @05:06PM (#3891082)
No I don't use the same IP. I do however brows Hacker News, Facebook, Reddit, etc from both work and home.

Interesting, thank you for the information.

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Re:Chrome extension to randomize your User Agent (Underpants) by eli on Monday April 23, 2012 @05:25PM (#3881055)
If you give yourself the user agent of a terrible browser, you're also going to get CSS hacks and JS kludges aimed at "fixing" that browser.

(Yes, yes, people shouldn't use UA sniffing to do that... but they do.)

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