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Google Is Removing an Insidious Tracking Tool From Its Browser

But the change may help Google more than its users

Photo: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

When you navigate to an article in a browser like Google Chrome, that browser automatically sends the site a string of text that looks something like this: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 10_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/602.1.50 (KHTML, like Gecko) CriOS/56.0.2924.75 Mobile/14E5239e Safari/602.1.

That gibberish tells the owner of the website a lot about your computer:

• Mozilla/5.0: The browser you’re using is “Mozilla-compatible.”
• (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 10_3 like Mac OS X): The platform you’re using is an iPhone, running iOS 10.3, which is based on macOS.
• CriOS/56.0.2924.75 Mobile/14E5239e Safari/602.1: The renderer used by the browser is Chrome for iOS, version 56, which is using the Apple Safari browser technology.

This list of details about your computer, called the “user agent,” was conceived in the early 1990s as a way to identify browsers visiting a website, and it’s now a standard part of all web browsers. But last week, Google said that it plans to phase out this user agent feature in the technology that powers Chrome, called Blink (the same technology also powers a number of…