I’m happy to see this being noticed more and more. Google wants to destroy the open web, so it’s a lot at stake.
Google basically says “Trust us”. What a joke.
I’m a bit less worried after reading this comment, which explains things like how they DON’T want it to be “DRM for the web” and the proposed measures to prevent it. https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/issues/28#issuecomment-1651129388
explain like i’m a developer why wei is bad? ad blocking can already be detected
What people are rightfully scared of is that:
- Big websites will only accept attestations from big companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft
- Google, Apple, and Microsoft will refuse to attest your browser if you have an adblocker installed, or if you are using a browser or operating system they don’t approve, or if you made modifications to your browser or your operating system etc.
While adblocking can be detected, you can block anti-adblock scripts, it’s sort of a weapons race. Depending on how deep an attestation goes, it might be extremely difficult to fight. Attestations might also be used to block more than just adblockers, for example using Firefox, or rooting/jailbreaking your phone, or installing an alternative OS might make your phone ineligible for attestations and thus locked out of a lot of the internet.
There’s an ongoing protest against this on GitHub, symbolically modifying the code that would implement this in Chromium. See this lemmy post by the person who had this idea, and this GitHub commit. Feel free to “Review changes” –> “Approve”. Around 300 people have joined so far.
I don’t think filling Google repositories with complaints and well-intentioned, but garbage issues/pull requests. At best they’ll just delete them occasionally and at worst work less in the open, changing permissions on repositories, doing discussions more in internal tools.
What you can do is support alternative browsers, get other people to use them too and notify news as well as your local politicians about such problems. Maybe join organizations on protecting privacy or computer clubs (in Germany, support e.g. Netzpolitik.org and CCC).
Maybe acknowledge what the in-principle good things about WEI would be and support alternative means of achieving them. This proposal uses good things like less reliance on captchas and tracking, a simple to use API to enable a huge potential for abuse and power grab. Alternatives might be a privacy pass, as mentioned by WebKit https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/234
Just like Trickle Down, “Don’t be evil” has aged well and deserves to be repackaged. /s
