>As a checkuser, user agents are an important part of my workflow for identifying that multiple accounts are owned by the same person.
> So I'm going to have to argue for including more information in the user agent.
Including more information on the UA, while being covered by legal under the new privacy policy, really goes agains the wishes of the community as they do not wish to be finger printed.
There has been plenty more discussions about this on analytics e-mail list.
>Your proposed user agent would basically mean that every single person using the most up-to-date version of the app on a particular platform would >be indistinguishable from each other. This would, unfortunately, lead to lots of innocent users getting blocked as sockpuppets.
However, note that the UA " WikipediaApp/<version> <OS>/<form-factor>/<version>" clearly satisfies the use case of the mobile team. It provides as much information as they need from their user without sending any private data.
Can you please list what is your use case? Namely how are you identifying "false" accounts. Perhaps relying on the user agent to do so is not the best strategy going forward. Have in mind that with the old privacy policy UA data needed to be discarded after 90 days. With the new policy there is more legal room but given community feedback analytics team is planning on aggregating all UA information in the future. This means that UA data will not be stored (or reported) per user or request but rather agreggated (as in "4% of users use iPhone").
We gathered recently information from all teams as to use cases pertaining UA data collection:
Let's talk about your use case and add it to the document that already exists describing usages of user agent data, this document was sent out to all teams couple months ago but there is no description of your use case there: