information that gets embedded in the compressed bitstring (GZIP)

[adeinega]

RFC 1952 tells us that GZIP member header stores information about

1. MTIME (if the compressed data did not come from a file, MTIME is set to the time at which compression started)
2. the Operation System (on which compression took place)
3. FNAME and FCOMMENT (file's name and comment)

and so forth per https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1952#page-6.

I tend to think we never want this information to be exposed.

In addition to that, there's another aspect I'd like to mention, different, or even the same, implementations of the GZip compressor can 'easily' produce non-deterministic output for the same input data (which isn't that great as well).

[adeinega]

To address both concerns, the specification may suggest to not include this (and other extra) information.

As an example, the standard GoLang compress/gzip package comes with good defaults OTB (everything is nil except for field OS which is 255, or simply "unknown").

However, a quick check shows things look differently for other GZIP libraries and utilities out there.