"--disable-blink-features=AutomationControlled" Really?

[RonaldRuckus]

I can understand wanting to use an LLM to browse the web.

Purposely obfuscating the fact that you're an automation tool is gross and supports people using more intrusive DRM to prevent bots from accessing their sites - at the expense of real visitors.

By all means this is automation software and should respect anti-bot protections.

For context:

"--disable-blink-features=AutomationControlled" is a command line argument that prevents Chromium from indicating that it's currently being controlled by automation software. This is a typical method used by data scrapers to obfuscate their program, bypassing anti-scraping/anti-bot protection.

For the good health of the WWW this service should be more respectful. Otherwise more intrusive methods will be introduced/implemented such as the intrusive Web Environment Integrity

[suchintan]

Thanks for opening this issue! We just added it because a lot of websites just dont work without it enabled

[suchintan]

Does anyone else have a strong opinion either way? We will let the community decide whether they want to remove it or keep it. Please 👍 or 👎 !

Keep it = 👍
Remove it = 👎

[RonaldRuckus]

I feel like this is like asking car drivers if they want to add or remove pedestrian walking strips.

Implementing this is a push towards more intrusive anti-bot security that will ultimately be the demise of this project and closed-off WWW. If a website doesn't want automated sessions it should be respected.

[suchintan]

The community is pretty split here. I'll leave this issue open in case anyone else has an opinion

FWIW -- the reason we left this in was because this is a pretty well understood chrome functionality -- it just goes one step further than the stuff mentioned here (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43143014/chrome-is-being-controlled-by-automated-test-software)

[andr0s]

There's already millions of bots on the internet. One less, one more. Doesn't change anything. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how we automate some tasks. You can spend your money on doing things using artificial networks via Skyvern, or pay your money to a cheap virtual assistant from Upwork, using human brain networks.

[piranhap]

I agree with this. There are so many bots and scrapers already that I don't think if one decides to be different it will make that much of a difference, heck, probably someone already grabbed the source code and made their own scraper already.