Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent

Re:Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent by rknightuk on Saturday June 15, 2024 @02:08PM (#40691503)

I wouldn’t because I have ethics.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent by sebzim4500 on Saturday June 15, 2024 @02:54PM (#40691869)

Here's my user agent on chrome:

>Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/126.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

There are at least five lies here.

* It isn't made by Mozilla

* It doesn't use WebKit

* It doesn't use KHTML

* It isn't safari

* That isn't even my version of chrome, presumably it hides the minor/patch versions for privacy reasons.

Lying in your user agent in order to make the internet work is a practice that is almost as old as user agents. Your browser is almost certainly doing it right now to look at this comment.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent by Findecanor on Saturday June 15, 2024 @05:11PM (#40692726)

> Lying in your user agent in order to make the internet work is a practice that is almost as old as user agents.

Twenty years ago, I set up a web proxy on my Linux PC at home to change the User Agent because I was tired of getting popups about my web browser (Opera) not being Mozilla or Internet Explorer. It even contained the text "Shut the F up and follow w3c standards!" at first, until I realised that sites could use that to track me.

[ Parent | on HN ]