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Comment by yosito | Hacker News Reader

25 years old and still constantly misused by tech companies to assume my language preferences while traveling even though my browser explicitly communicates my language and locale preferences. Spotify and Google are particularly notorious offenders.

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MDN doesn't like it

> Browsers set required values for this header according to their active user interface language. Users rarely change it, and such changes are not recommended because they may lead to fingerprinting.

> The content of Accept-Language is often out of a user's control (when traveling, for instance). A user may also want to visit a page in a language different from the user interface language.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ac...

:shrug:

There are a million metrics that can be used for fingerprinting, the notion of avoiding language detection because fingerprinting seems a bit weak - it’s pretty hard to fingerprint me if I’m not willing to fumble your site to configure my language, and I assume for non English speakers hard locking browser resolution to 1920x1080 to prevent resolution fingerprinting would presumably be a more usable limitation.

Edit: and ‘a user might not be the owner of the computer and therefore the accept language might be wrong‘ sounds like a UI problem that a ‘file -> set language’ workflow would solve.

Agreed

Accept-Language is far more under my control while traveling than my IP address. Especially for services that actively block VPNs.

God yes. It's still an uphill battle trying to convince my PC that I indeed want to have english-everything, although my PC is in europe. And boy do some websites go through hoops to be "clever"

I can kind of see why this is all the case: IP geolocating can be assumed to be generally useful, locale settings expressed by the browser and/or operating system could have been explicitly set or just left as what they came out of the box and thus unreliable.

That said: There's a reason I am going to google.com and not google.co.jp, fucking thanks fucking good day fucking fuck.

It is a faulty assumption that IP geolocation is generally useful. It's often not, at all. The only context in which it might seem so is if you live on an English speaking continent. Otherwise, you're going to constantly misidentify people who live near borders, who use a VPN, or who have a different language preference than the offical language where their ISP is located. Locale settings expressed by the browser are the user's explicit preference, and extremely reliable. When was the last time you unboxed a new device, and on the very first OS setup screen when you have to choose your language preference, you chose a language that you don't speak? No one does that! And when was the last time you had to use a device that wasn't yours and had the language set to a language you don't speak? Never! So I don't know where you got this idea that somehow the majority of people are using devices that are set to a language that they don't speak.

>Locale settings expressed by the browser are the user's explicit preference,

From experience watching other people use computers, most people don't even know WTF "locale" is or anything even tangentially related. More than likely they just use whatever was configured by default, which most of the time makes sense for them but it's not a given.

Hence, it's unreliable.

IP geolocation on the other hand, you can at least assume the broad region where they are connecting from (VPNs and proxies aside).

That "default" is typically set by the language choice in the OS, which is exactly why it is reliable, because people understand language selectors just fine.

I know precisely zero people who know how to change the OS's language settings, assuming they weren't already knowledgable with computers.

> I indeed want to have english-everything

english + metric || gtfo

> boy do some websites go through hoops to be "clever"

1. I'm in (east of) France geo

2. My system is set to en_GB

Yet some websites insist in putting me in Germany. Sometimes it even changes between requests (web pages), some are extra nutty and I even get mixed content within the same page.

For the love of all that is holy, please stop being clever. UAs have had Accept-Language headers ever since RFC3282. Use that hint.

Wrote about that 7 years ago over here https://kristopolous.medium.com/stop-guessing-languages-base...

I usually mentally filter any links that I see that are on medium, and actively block them from search results.

Old articles like yours can be read to the end, but with a banner blocking a third of the page, and nearly 100% of new articles I've come across in the past year get a nice paywall right at the entire reason I clicked on the article. All the new articles that aren't blocked are worthless content I wish I hadn't clicked on.

I should probably just self host all my stuff and stop assuming decent platforms are going to continue being reasonable because they always seem to break themselves

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