Fedora browser spyware

Installing Fedora distribution Brave browser be aware of it, - default plugin is changing User-Agent header to track that you’re using Fedora. Same suitable for fedora’s Firefox, but you can’t change it, it’s compiled in. Details under cut.

For Brave you can just disable plugin.

For Firefox you have to add specific configuration variable, -

• go to about:config
• add general.useragent.override
• put desired value for your user agent, for instance Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 9.0; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko

Why thats an issue ?

Brave was installed from snap, so if that was compiled inside Brave distribution, why not something else can be compiled, you can’t check for everything, thats why it is very important to compile your software from source code, and be sure it’s not contain of something more harmful.

Firefox tells you everwhere that they are for Privacy, but the same time they remove user-agent option and put marks inside it.

Firefox privacy

Summary

• Compile from source code when applicable
• If you want Firefox use only official site version, not distribution version, until it’s Icecat