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Google's New Web Environment Integrity Proposal Dismissed by Brave, Mozilla, and Vivaldi
(news.itsfoss.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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I don't understand why so many opinion pieces and news keep on saying that Web Environment Integrity could be abused and that's why we should oppose it. This misses the point a great deal.
Implementation of Web Environment Integrity in browsers IS ITSELF AN ABUSE, because I have the right to go around the web without continually proving who I am, even less against a 3rd party.
It's as if someone said that some officer (and not even a government one) should always be by your side when you go out, ready to certify who you are, whenever you speak with people on the street – and even with friends. Would you accept that?
Are we totally out of our minds??
How would WEI work? What signals does my computer send to convince the other computers that my computer is doing what they want? Is it based on some "trusted computer" hardware level bullshit that's already there? (I just want my computer to do what I want.)
That's not part of this spec, all it says is that the attester produces a cryptographic proof. What it checks and what that proof means is for the attester to decide.
Google and Apple say they would "just" check if the user is logged into their Google/Apple account, as a way to proof that they are human and not a bot. That would be bad enough, because you should not have to have an account with these companies to browse the web. But they could easily make it even worse, by requiring you to install a kind of anti-cheat software that scans your device, and only provide the proof if they like the results. Heck they could just exclude everyone who visited a certain website in the past or who's name starts with an F if they wanted to, because that's how broad and dangerous this proposal is!
Big companies should not be able to decide if people are allowed to visit certain websites or not, even if they say they have the best intentions.