Betting devices

[Bonnie]

Can Betfair identify the type of device used to place bets, e.g. iphone, samsung phone, ipad, tablet, pc etc.

[spreadbetting]

If you're going through the website they can, probably not if you're connecting to the api

[Bonnie]

thanks

[LinusP]

Yep it will all be in the user agent (can be spoofed)

[Bonnie]

Linus can you explain a bit more.

[LinusP]

When you make an http request the user agent tells the server what device you are using so it knows how to respond e.g.

Code: Select all

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 10_3_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/603.1.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) CriOS/59.0.3071.102 Mobile/14F89 Safari/602.1

Using google chrome you can spoof this by pretending to be something else e.g. An android phone. Betfair are likely to use this info for analytics when it comes to working out how many people are using the app/api/desktop version. They may also use it to block you if you are scraping the site instead of using the API or ddos'ing.

[Bonnie]

Thanks Linus. One more. If you are using a VPS can they identify the device.

[spreadbetting]

The VPS will only change your IP address so it looks like the request is coming from a different location not device, a bit like you ringing from your neighbours address rather than your home phone, your voice is still the same unless you change it or spoof it.

[LinusP]

Thanks Linus. One more. If you are using a VPS can they identify the device.

What do you mean by device? If using BA I Betfair will know based on how you are logging into the API.