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I was browsing a website with domain httpbin.org that allows me to investigate my own HTTP request headers. This morning the website said they look like this:

{
  "headers": {
    "Accept": "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8", 
    "Accept-Encoding": "gzip, deflate", 
    "Accept-Language": "en-US,en;q=0.5", 
    "Host": "httpbin.org", 
    "Upgrade-Insecure-Requests": "1", 
    "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/115.0", 
    "X-Amzn-Trace-Id": "Root=1-6558b778-1cc87dac09df546a2a420a25"
  }
}

What sparked my interest is the field labelled X-Amzn-Trace-Id, which I have never seen before. So I tried to google what it is. I got the impression that it is related to Amazon, but it appears that all the articles that mention it already assume the reader knows what it is.

  • But I don't know what it is. So I would like to know what some basic information about it: Who have come up with it? What is it supposed to be used for?
  • If it assigns an id to my device, I'd like to get rid of it so I can optimize my anonymity. Is that possible?
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1 Answer 1

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It is a header associated with an Amazon load balancer.

This does not track you personally, but it does track your browser, for strictly application load balancing needs.

A Google search reveals this on Amazon’s AWS site:

When the load balancer receives a request from a client, it adds or updates the X-Amzn-Trace-Id header before sending the request to the target. Any services or applications between the load balancer and the target can also add or update this header.

You can use request tracing to track HTTP requests from clients to targets or other services. If you enable access logs, the contents of the X-Amzn-Trace-Id header are logged.

So if you visited a site hosted by Amazon’s web services and that site used an application load balancer, this header would have been set by the server.

This is a functional header and not a header that reveals PII (Personally Identifiable Information) so I would not be concerned about privacy exposure and such.

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  • Thanks for your message. Is it typically possible to unset or suppress headers in requests my browsers?
    – Mikke Mus
    Commented Nov 18, 2023 at 15:19
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    No. Your browser is not what's adding this header. It's the load balancer that's between you and the actual web server.
    – Daniel B
    Commented Nov 18, 2023 at 15:23
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    That's badly put. Headers are definitely set by the browser. However, (legitimate) intermediary parties may add, remove or modify headers freely, and there is no way to prevent this.
    – Daniel B
    Commented Nov 18, 2023 at 15:32
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    Which organization determines who is legitimate?
    – Mikke Mus
    Commented Nov 18, 2023 at 15:57

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