OpenAI wants agents to tell websites where you are

When an AI agent or a cloud browser visits a website for you, the site sees the agent’s IP address and user agent, not yours. Two engineers at OpenAI want to change that. Their Internet-Draft, shared with the IETF’s HTTP Working Group today, lets an agent pass along your network, your country, a masked version of your IP address, your locale, your time zone and the browser or app you used. The problem behind it is real. This draft is the wrong fix, and I’ve sent that feedback to the mailing list. Here’s the longer version. Six new parameters The draft is called draft-panero-httpbis-forwarded-user-signals. It adds six optional parameters to the existing Forwarded header: asn, ip-country, ip-prefix, locale, tz and user-agent. A request from an agent could then carry something like this: Forwarded: asn=64496;ip-prefix="192.0.2.0/24";user-agent="Example/1" To be fair to the authors: the draft bans persistent user and device IDs, tells senders to share as little as possible, and says…

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