15 ms·

I find the blatant gaslighting regarding this topic baffling. > Wisner insists that “WEI is not designed to single out browsers or extensions” and that it won’

I find the blatant gaslighting regarding this topic baffling. > Wisner insists that “WEI is not designed to single out browsers or extensions” and that it won’t block browsers that spoof their identity. WEI's sole purpose in life is to detect browsers that do things that Google does not like. If it does not block browsers that spoof their identity then what the hell does it do? Sure, sure, WEI won't block them: it will just tell the web server that you are not using an approved browser. It's not Google's fault if the web server then blocks you! How could they have known? I would find it slightly more respectable if Google just came out and said the quiet part out loud: "Our profits and the industry's profits are more important than your freedom, so shut up and take it, since you can do nothing about it." Sneaking around like this is just an insult to our intelligence.

andrei_says_ 3y ago
> Our profits and the industry's profits are more important than your freedom, so shut up and take it, since you can do nothing about it. I honestly think they are saying it, just in their weasel speak gaslighting way.
devsda 3y ago
It is not just gaslighting but there were attempts to malign those who are opposing this. From official proposal forum: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/Ux5h_kGO22g/m/XCAIgPtxAQAJ https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/Ux5h_... > Attacks and doxing make me personally MORE likely to support stronger safety features in chromium, as such acts increase my suspicion that there is significant intimidation from criminals who are afraid this feature will disrupt their illegal and/or unethical businesses, and I don't give in to criminals or bullies They have apologized for using the word criminals & bullies in a broader context and I appreciate that. However, the initial part of the comment is very telling of how they view those who oppose. This proposal will mainly disrupt ad-blockers, rooted devices and any one who is willing to maintain control of their own tech stack and they are considered illegal/unethical businesses. I can't ignore the parallels with the real world here. Authoritarian government introduces laws that restrict freedom and privacy. People oppose and protest. Government doubles down and proclaims only those who do illegal activities are protesting and they are the ones that have something to hide. Seeing how many there are, we urgently need these laws. Further down in the response: > the whole point of designing in the open and having public debate is to find reasonable compromises between stakeholders with very different perspectives You can either introduce a hostile feature in one go or through a series of "compromises" which is also known as "Boiling the frog" strategy. Unless the current one is abandoned and there's a radically different approach, I don't think there's any scope for compromise in the current proposal.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  "Stakeholders" is just an euphemism for "the people with the money". The "stakeholders" want it this way, "finding compromises" just means figuring out how to get everyone else to accept it.
- the_lego 3y ago
  > Attacks and doxing make me personally MORE likely to support stronger safety features in chromium, as such acts increase my suspicion that there is significant intimidation from criminals who are afraid this feature will disrupt their illegal and/or unethical businesses, and I don't give in to criminals or bullies > Kick a puppy > Get attacked for kicking a puppy > "These attacks make me MORE likely to keep kicking puppies, as I don't give in to intimidation from criminals and bullies that want healthy puppies for their nefarious ends."
  - Macha 3y ago
    This seems to be a growing corporate strategy 1. Take an action that will annoy a large group of people 2. Since it is a large group of people, there will be some that take criticism too far 3. Hold up those examples as being representative of all your critics 4. No longer debate your unpopular action, claim it's for harassment reasons.
    - licebmi__at__ 3y ago
      >growing I mean, you must be new to activism, but yeah, this is textbook deflection.
    - walterbell 3y ago
      > there will be some that take criticism too far If not, that can be remedied.
- lucasyvas 3y ago
  Mr. Wisner should grow thicker skin - if this is the reaction now wait until the real roasting begins for what is probably the shittiest proposal of all time. In a just world anyone supporting this initiative would be imprisoned in my books. It's a time bombed crime against humanity waiting to happen. They know what they are doing and got called out on it.
GhostWhisperer 3y ago
> you can do nothing about it there is plenty we can do, but we have to give up some "comforts"
- alex7734 3y ago
  Sure, you can convince people to use Firefox and drop Chrome just like IE was dropped back in the day but back then there wasn't a strong incentive to websites to prefer one browser over another (other than convenience). Here's what I think is gonna happen: - First the feature is added to Chrome as it is now. As they described they add it with some kind of hold-back or limiting constraint to reduce the outrage until everything is ready. - Then the media people (Netflix, Hulu, Disney, YouTube...), who have long been salivating for something like this, push the other browsers to implement this. You really only need to convince Safari, as Edge has such a low market share in comparison that they will be forced to fold or be irrelevant (and it's not like Microsoft hates this feature anyway). For reference, Chrome, Safari and Edge make up 89% of market share. Edge alone is only 4%. - Once the browsers are on board it's time to get the sites onboard. Really most people tend to visit social media sites more than anything else, so as long as you get them onboard you don't need to do anything else, and WEI serves their interests as well (for example it would stop you from scraping Reddit). - As for the rest of the sites you can just make Adsense not count views or clicks from untrusted users (after all that's the _stated goal_ of this project) and site owners _will_ find ways to get their users to switch to Chrome on their own. You can add a checkbox to Adsense to get it to block your site for untrusted users to make it extra easy if you're feeling lazy. - The final strike will be Cloudflare. Right now they rely on CAPTCHA to block bots but now they can just use WEI instead. Since most of the web uses Cloudflare now you have a gateway between the user and most sites that will tell you to go away or eternally give you endless CAPTCHAS if you are using a "bad browser". - At this point all that is left is getting Google to give Cloudflare an exemption to the hold-back feature "for the greater good" or just kill it off at this point because there's no need to play nice anymore. I'm not optimistic. It was easy to install Firefox and remove the IE icon on your mom's computer back in the day. It's not that easy to tell her to stop watching Netflix, Disney, Reddit, Facebook, her favorite cooking recipe site... The best that can happen is that the internet splits and the free portion of it stays large enough to be useful. (and it doesn't get DDOSed into the ground)
genocidicbunny 3y ago
> > Wisner insists that “WEI is not designed to single out browsers or extensions” and that it won’t block browsers that spoof their identity. Lets have Wisner, or Google, put their money where their mouth is. Lets have a serious financial penalty per instance where someone's browser is blocked due to WEI, regardless of who is doing the actual blocking. Because that is what you're promising us here. Or are you a bold-faced liar Mr. Wisner?
- martin8412 3y ago
  100mio per instance sounds fair for Google, and 10k per instance for Wisner sounds fair. It's after all not something that will happen he claims.
  - paradox460 3y ago
    And a requirement that both personally apologize to those affected for every single instance
    - rolph 3y ago
      verbal repairations to damaged reputation, and statement of fault.
    - martin8412 3y ago
      Personally? Not needed. It just needs to be posted in <h1> on Google.com
      - paradox460 3y ago
        No I want some executive to come out, buy me a nice meal, and explain why they fucked up and how they're going to make it right.
pawelmurias 3y ago
> If it does not block browsers that spoof their identity then what the hell does it do? They mentioned recognizing which ads where viewed and clicked by humans. Stood out as the thing they really want.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  They want the browser to be their corporate agents rather than our user agents. They think the browser is just a vehicle for their ads.
- danShumway 3y ago
  That's what we're getting at though: if you don't block browsers that spoof their identity, then you don't know that the browser isn't acting as a robot and clicking on ads in place of a human. The only way this proposal is valuable for reducing ad fraud is if it blocks browser automation.
  - pawelmurias 3y ago
    You can recognize a browser as suspicious and not pay for or flag the ad clicks it makes without blocking access.
    - danShumway 3y ago
      We might be talking past each other. I'm talking about what browsers Google blocks, ie what browsers don't get attestation tokens. If Google isn't blocking extensions, ad fraud can still happen and your ad server won't recognize the browser as suspicious because it will have an attestation token. If Google isn't blocking spoofed browsers from attestation, they won't look suspicious. They'll have normal attestation tokens. Allowing a browser to spoof their identity as Chrome means there isn't really any distinction between a trusted and untrusted browser. ---- To your specific point though, let's imagine that Google does block those browsers in the sense that it marks them as untrusted, but it's up to the individual ad networks to figure out if they want to block those requests or not. If the idea here is that ad networks will recognize that a browser is unapproved and will still serve it the content anyway but just auto-discard the data that's coming out of it, I would really strongly suggest that is not a very likely outcome. You're telling me if I use Firefox and it doesn't implement this API, every ad company will just stop tracking me and will discard any ad numbers they get from me? If Safari ends up not implementing this API ad-clicks on Safari will just get automatically flagged as spam? No ad network is going to want to do that, especially if automatic hold-backs get involved. A policy that guaranteed lowers your monetizable impressions/clicks by at least 5-15%, even though you know for a fact that many of those clicks are coming from real users? I have a really hard time believing any ad network would accept that.
martin8412 3y ago
Zyklon B was also not designed to kill people, but the people at Degesch sure as hell knew what NSDAP was going to use those large quantities for.
danShumway 3y ago
This is Google's general strategy for dealing with any controversy surrounding web standards, not just the big ones around ad blocking. The first thing that they will always say is, "critics don't understand what we're trying to do and they're unknowledgeable about the spec and there's a lot of misinformation floating around..." Literally any controversy about a standard that Chrome adopts, that will always be the first thing that Google says. It's just a standard pattern. Being able to say, "I understand people's concerns and I have concerns and we need to have a conversation and iterate but it's just hard with all this misinformation floating around" allows Google to position themselves as a reasonable party while also allowing them to completely ignore any criticism that is inconvenient because they just lump it into the misinformation category. If the gaslighting doesn't work, Google's next step will be to talk about how the debate has spiraled out of control and how everyone needs to "remember the human." If that doesn't work, they'll lock down and refuse to talk to critics and then plead with critics to be patient because "we're working on it." Then they'll make some minor changes to the spec and claim that everyone's criticisms are outdated and go back to the gaslighting again. That's already happened here, the original spec did not mandate hold-backs, in fact it suggested that hold-backs were not a desirable solution to pursue. Now all of a sudden it's, "why is everyone so mad, don't they know we have hold-backs?" If everything falls apart and Google has to backtrack, the closest thing that you'll get to an apology from Google is that "we need to be better about communicating with users/developers." It's not that anything was wrong, it was that the web standards teams just weren't able to communicate how right they were. And then we'll repeat the process with whatever the next controversy is. ---- I wrote a little bit about this process back in 2018 when web audio was the controversy (a comparatively minor browser change with very few privacy implications): https://danshumway.com/blog/chrome-autoplay https://danshumway.com/blog/chrome-autoplay and I keep paying attention to how Chrome approaches controversy, and it's pretty much always following this pattern, it's wild how consistently this has played out with Manifest V3, FLOC, Topics, etc, etc... Developers and users should get better at recognizing this stuff during debates about Google policy, and they should go into conversations with the Chromium team about web standard controversies expecting that they will play out this way.
- barkingcat 3y ago
  What happens next is they implement it, and then cancel the entire project by shutting it down because the manager that championed it moved to a different department/product. when asked why would they shut down something they were fighting nail and tooth for, they would shrug and say it's not in the okr. (and gaslight everyone again, saying they never thought it was important to begin with)

andrei_says_ 3y ago

> Our profits and the industry's profits are more important than your freedom, so shut up and take it, since you can do nothing about it. I honestly think they are saying it, just in their weasel speak gaslighting way.

devsda 3y ago

It is not just gaslighting but there were attempts to malign those who are opposing this. From official proposal forum: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/Ux5h_kGO22g/m/XCAIgPtxAQAJ https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/Ux5h_... > Attacks and doxing make me personally MORE likely to support stronger safety features in chromium, as such acts increase my suspicion that there is significant intimidation from criminals who are afraid this feature will disrupt their illegal and/or unethical businesses, and I don't give in to criminals or bullies They have apologized for using the word criminals & bullies in a broader context and I appreciate that. However, the initial part of the comment is very telling of how they view those who oppose. This proposal will mainly disrupt ad-blockers, rooted devices and any one who is willing to maintain control of their own tech stack and they are considered illegal/unethical businesses. I can't ignore the parallels with the real world here. Authoritarian government introduces laws that restrict freedom and privacy. People oppose and protest. Government doubles down and proclaims only those who do illegal activities are protesting and they are the ones that have something to hide. Seeing how many there are, we urgently need these laws. Further down in the response: > the whole point of designing in the open and having public debate is to find reasonable compromises between stakeholders with very different perspectives You can either introduce a hostile feature in one go or through a series of "compromises" which is also known as "Boiling the frog" strategy. Unless the current one is abandoned and there's a radically different approach, I don't think there's any scope for compromise in the current proposal.

matheusmoreira 3y ago
"Stakeholders" is just an euphemism for "the people with the money". The "stakeholders" want it this way, "finding compromises" just means figuring out how to get everyone else to accept it.
the_lego 3y ago
> Attacks and doxing make me personally MORE likely to support stronger safety features in chromium, as such acts increase my suspicion that there is significant intimidation from criminals who are afraid this feature will disrupt their illegal and/or unethical businesses, and I don't give in to criminals or bullies > Kick a puppy > Get attacked for kicking a puppy > "These attacks make me MORE likely to keep kicking puppies, as I don't give in to intimidation from criminals and bullies that want healthy puppies for their nefarious ends."
- Macha 3y ago
  This seems to be a growing corporate strategy 1. Take an action that will annoy a large group of people 2. Since it is a large group of people, there will be some that take criticism too far 3. Hold up those examples as being representative of all your critics 4. No longer debate your unpopular action, claim it's for harassment reasons.
  - licebmi__at__ 3y ago
    >growing I mean, you must be new to activism, but yeah, this is textbook deflection.
  - walterbell 3y ago
    > there will be some that take criticism too far If not, that can be remedied.
lucasyvas 3y ago
Mr. Wisner should grow thicker skin - if this is the reaction now wait until the real roasting begins for what is probably the shittiest proposal of all time. In a just world anyone supporting this initiative would be imprisoned in my books. It's a time bombed crime against humanity waiting to happen. They know what they are doing and got called out on it.

GhostWhisperer 3y ago

> you can do nothing about it there is plenty we can do, but we have to give up some "comforts"

alex7734 3y ago
Sure, you can convince people to use Firefox and drop Chrome just like IE was dropped back in the day but back then there wasn't a strong incentive to websites to prefer one browser over another (other than convenience). Here's what I think is gonna happen: - First the feature is added to Chrome as it is now. As they described they add it with some kind of hold-back or limiting constraint to reduce the outrage until everything is ready. - Then the media people (Netflix, Hulu, Disney, YouTube...), who have long been salivating for something like this, push the other browsers to implement this. You really only need to convince Safari, as Edge has such a low market share in comparison that they will be forced to fold or be irrelevant (and it's not like Microsoft hates this feature anyway). For reference, Chrome, Safari and Edge make up 89% of market share. Edge alone is only 4%. - Once the browsers are on board it's time to get the sites onboard. Really most people tend to visit social media sites more than anything else, so as long as you get them onboard you don't need to do anything else, and WEI serves their interests as well (for example it would stop you from scraping Reddit). - As for the rest of the sites you can just make Adsense not count views or clicks from untrusted users (after all that's the _stated goal_ of this project) and site owners _will_ find ways to get their users to switch to Chrome on their own. You can add a checkbox to Adsense to get it to block your site for untrusted users to make it extra easy if you're feeling lazy. - The final strike will be Cloudflare. Right now they rely on CAPTCHA to block bots but now they can just use WEI instead. Since most of the web uses Cloudflare now you have a gateway between the user and most sites that will tell you to go away or eternally give you endless CAPTCHAS if you are using a "bad browser". - At this point all that is left is getting Google to give Cloudflare an exemption to the hold-back feature "for the greater good" or just kill it off at this point because there's no need to play nice anymore. I'm not optimistic. It was easy to install Firefox and remove the IE icon on your mom's computer back in the day. It's not that easy to tell her to stop watching Netflix, Disney, Reddit, Facebook, her favorite cooking recipe site... The best that can happen is that the internet splits and the free portion of it stays large enough to be useful. (and it doesn't get DDOSed into the ground)

genocidicbunny 3y ago

> > Wisner insists that “WEI is not designed to single out browsers or extensions” and that it won’t block browsers that spoof their identity. Lets have Wisner, or Google, put their money where their mouth is. Lets have a serious financial penalty per instance where someone's browser is blocked due to WEI, regardless of who is doing the actual blocking. Because that is what you're promising us here. Or are you a bold-faced liar Mr. Wisner?

martin8412 3y ago
100mio per instance sounds fair for Google, and 10k per instance for Wisner sounds fair. It's after all not something that will happen he claims.
- paradox460 3y ago
  And a requirement that both personally apologize to those affected for every single instance
  - rolph 3y ago
    verbal repairations to damaged reputation, and statement of fault.
  - martin8412 3y ago
    Personally? Not needed. It just needs to be posted in <h1> on Google.com
    - paradox460 3y ago
      No I want some executive to come out, buy me a nice meal, and explain why they fucked up and how they're going to make it right.

pawelmurias 3y ago

> If it does not block browsers that spoof their identity then what the hell does it do? They mentioned recognizing which ads where viewed and clicked by humans. Stood out as the thing they really want.

matheusmoreira 3y ago
They want the browser to be their corporate agents rather than our user agents. They think the browser is just a vehicle for their ads.
danShumway 3y ago
That's what we're getting at though: if you don't block browsers that spoof their identity, then you don't know that the browser isn't acting as a robot and clicking on ads in place of a human. The only way this proposal is valuable for reducing ad fraud is if it blocks browser automation.
- pawelmurias 3y ago
  You can recognize a browser as suspicious and not pay for or flag the ad clicks it makes without blocking access.
  - danShumway 3y ago
    We might be talking past each other. I'm talking about what browsers Google blocks, ie what browsers don't get attestation tokens. If Google isn't blocking extensions, ad fraud can still happen and your ad server won't recognize the browser as suspicious because it will have an attestation token. If Google isn't blocking spoofed browsers from attestation, they won't look suspicious. They'll have normal attestation tokens. Allowing a browser to spoof their identity as Chrome means there isn't really any distinction between a trusted and untrusted browser. ---- To your specific point though, let's imagine that Google does block those browsers in the sense that it marks them as untrusted, but it's up to the individual ad networks to figure out if they want to block those requests or not. If the idea here is that ad networks will recognize that a browser is unapproved and will still serve it the content anyway but just auto-discard the data that's coming out of it, I would really strongly suggest that is not a very likely outcome. You're telling me if I use Firefox and it doesn't implement this API, every ad company will just stop tracking me and will discard any ad numbers they get from me? If Safari ends up not implementing this API ad-clicks on Safari will just get automatically flagged as spam? No ad network is going to want to do that, especially if automatic hold-backs get involved. A policy that guaranteed lowers your monetizable impressions/clicks by at least 5-15%, even though you know for a fact that many of those clicks are coming from real users? I have a really hard time believing any ad network would accept that.

martin8412 3y ago

Zyklon B was also not designed to kill people, but the people at Degesch sure as hell knew what NSDAP was going to use those large quantities for.

danShumway 3y ago

This is Google's general strategy for dealing with any controversy surrounding web standards, not just the big ones around ad blocking. The first thing that they will always say is, "critics don't understand what we're trying to do and they're unknowledgeable about the spec and there's a lot of misinformation floating around..." Literally any controversy about a standard that Chrome adopts, that will always be the first thing that Google says. It's just a standard pattern. Being able to say, "I understand people's concerns and I have concerns and we need to have a conversation and iterate but it's just hard with all this misinformation floating around" allows Google to position themselves as a reasonable party while also allowing them to completely ignore any criticism that is inconvenient because they just lump it into the misinformation category. If the gaslighting doesn't work, Google's next step will be to talk about how the debate has spiraled out of control and how everyone needs to "remember the human." If that doesn't work, they'll lock down and refuse to talk to critics and then plead with critics to be patient because "we're working on it." Then they'll make some minor changes to the spec and claim that everyone's criticisms are outdated and go back to the gaslighting again. That's already happened here, the original spec did not mandate hold-backs, in fact it suggested that hold-backs were not a desirable solution to pursue. Now all of a sudden it's, "why is everyone so mad, don't they know we have hold-backs?" If everything falls apart and Google has to backtrack, the closest thing that you'll get to an apology from Google is that "we need to be better about communicating with users/developers." It's not that anything was wrong, it was that the web standards teams just weren't able to communicate how right they were. And then we'll repeat the process with whatever the next controversy is. ---- I wrote a little bit about this process back in 2018 when web audio was the controversy (a comparatively minor browser change with very few privacy implications): https://danshumway.com/blog/chrome-autoplay https://danshumway.com/blog/chrome-autoplay and I keep paying attention to how Chrome approaches controversy, and it's pretty much always following this pattern, it's wild how consistently this has played out with Manifest V3, FLOC, Topics, etc, etc... Developers and users should get better at recognizing this stuff during debates about Google policy, and they should go into conversations with the Chromium team about web standard controversies expecting that they will play out this way.

barkingcat 3y ago
What happens next is they implement it, and then cancel the entire project by shutting it down because the manager that championed it moved to a different department/product. when asked why would they shut down something they were fighting nail and tooth for, they would shrug and say it's not in the okr. (and gaslight everyone again, saying they never thought it was important to begin with)