The boiling frog of digital freedom

I say this as somebody who has done several of these and is trying to continue to expand. but damn, the is a lot of stuff that you miss out on and I'm starting to be squeezed by the losses to move back.

I guess I'm saying, even though I feel driven by a massive moral imperative to engage with technology in that fashion, I find it absurdly difficult to the point of failure. I'm not ready to be a hermit.

From there it follows that it is indeed a proper freedom to be able to communicate while limiting the scope of who is privy to that communication, including limiting what can be attributed to some singular inescapable "identity". Saying that preventing this is "a good thing 99% of the time" is a baseless assertion. While this may appear similar to how social strictures have been managed for thousands of years - that's thousands of years of oppression of individuality and persecution for deviating from the herd. The West has overtly bucked that vein of collectivism, which I'd call progress.

Furthermore what you're invoking as some open-and-shut traditional state of affairs was anything but. Witness the concept of hearsay - where party B claims that party A has said something, ostensibly so that others will judge party A for it, but modulo B's reputation. Digital communications render hearsay moot - the default result of party B being able to prove to themselves that party A said something, is that party B can also prove to anyone that party A said that thing. Hence the need for the cryptographic property of repudiation, as the physics of digital information leaves no ambiguous middle ground.

There are obviously some specifics there, like if the camera on my phone has a firmware blob, does that need to be able to have the firmware updated? A lot of little caveats like that make such a law difficult, but I think with hardware access the open source community can flourish on devices like smart TVs, etc.

First let me add some snippets on what the authors of WEI think can be gained from it:

* This is beneficial for anti-fraud measures. Websites commonly use fingerprinting techniques to try to verify that a real human is using a real device[1]

One of the proposed use cases: Detect non-human traffic in advertising to improve user experience and access to web content* [2]

Another snippet :

we could standardize the set of signals that browsers will receive from attesters, and have one of those signals be whether the attester recommends the browser for sites to trust (based on a well-defined acceptance criteria). As new browsers are introduced, they would need to demonstrate to attesters (a relatively small group) that they pass the bar, but they wouldn't need to convince all the websites in the world [2]

This is clearly an attempt at gatekeeping both web client software and the clients themselves.

> What do they gain from it?

I think we can agree that Google is primarily an advertising and search company. One of the threats to Google's revenue as an advertising company is ad-fraud and this 'anti-fraud' measures protect their bottom-line. Another threat is ad-blocking and though they don't explicitly mention it, the WEI "bar" mentioned above can potentially be used to prevent ad-blocking by denying attestation to clients capable of ad-blocking (either directly or by allowing plugins).

Client attestation also prevents bots(both good & bad bots of all types including new search indexing bots) from accessing websites. This has a nice side-effect for Google that it restricts building a new search engine(a competitor) without its blessing. Search is a gateway to Google's advertising.

> And why exactly do you think they'd want to do that?

Like any product that any company introduces, it is to drive adoption? The more websites use it, the more normalized and legitimate WEI becomes. Once it becomes a standard and an integral part of web, it is easier to dictate terms that keep their position entrenched.

We can argue whether ad-blocking or bots are good or not and whether these concerns are all pure speculation or hyperbole. But once the technical capability is there and it is only the ethical/moral belief of corporate executives( and probability of government intervention) that prevent it, I wouldn't trust them to do the right thing especially when money is involved.

[1] - https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/Ux5h_...

[2] - https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/...