Another example that springs to mind is Uber, who used a tool called "Greyball" to avoid contact between drivers and authorities: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-uber-greyball-idUKKBN16B0...

My initial reaction was astonishment that the engineers would happily implement this. And maybe that is what happened. But the alternative possibility is that product and senior management assigned different parts of the feature to different teams e.g. one team develops a pattern recognition system to detect users' professions, another team develops a spoofing system for use in demos, etc...

“Research”

In order for someone to slow down the by browser they need someone to have coded the following:

- UA Detection

- Branching for when the flag is on or off

- a timeout that only runs when these two things are true

That takes an engineer to do the work. Marketing and product managers are not writing this code certainly.

If they’re abusing a differ t flag, then the real question I have is what the flags purpose is and why is it screening Firefox.

Either way there is an intention of UA checking and throttling based on the UA and that takes an engineer to do it