The overall goal for the spec is described in the comment:
> The WEI experiment is part of a larger goal to keep the web safe and open while discouraging cross-site tracking and lessening the reliance on fingerprinting for combating fraud and abuse. Fraud detection and mitigation techniques often rely heavily on analyzing unique client behavior over time for anomalies, which involves large collection of client data from both human users and suspected automated clients.
In other words, the intended goal of this spec is to discourage the development and use of fingerprinting techniques, login screens, and other invasive user-validation techniques on websites.
However, the goal of holdbacks is then described in the following way:
> This is designed to prevent WEI from becoming “DRM for the web”. Any sites that attempted to restrict browser access based on WEI signals alone would have also restricted access to a significant enough proportion of attestable devices to disincentivize this behavior. [...] The hold-back and the lack of browser identification in the response provides cover to browsers that spoof their user agents that might otherwise be treated differently by sites. This also includes custom forks of Chromium that web developers create.
In other words, one of the goals for the holdback system is to make it practically impossible for a website not to have fallback mechanisms for validating user trust when encountering requests that don't have attestation. And a essential part of that design is that even implementing browsers like Chrome will refuse to verify the environment integrity 10-15% of the time.
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So why is this a problem? Because holdbacks are on-purposed designed to make it so that fallback mechanisms have to exist and that sites can't skip including them; but the whole point of this spec as stated is to discourage developers from building those same fallbacks they're required to include because the fallbacks violate privacy or are are invasive or are essentially login walls.
And 10-15% of the time even users in participating browsers will be subjected to those fallback strategies. So you're still basically guaranteed to have your device fingerprinted, and any site that uses login as a backup verification method still will require you to make an account.
The only thing that this would affect is the frequency of user-annoyances in front of websites -- essentially, if sites started using this as a substitute for captchas, this would encourage them to drastically increase the number of captchas they use since Chrome browsers would only see 10-15% of those captchas.
And that's also a problem if you're trying to guarantee that competing browsers won't be affected, because "your users see 9x as many captchas on every website" is a pretty stinking big competitive moat.
Forgive me for thinking that "you can build a browser that competes with us, but unless we specifically approve of your browser, anyone who uses it on Android will be solving captchas over and over at a massively increased rate until they eventually give up and move back to Chrome like a good little consumer" still kind of has a lot antitrust implications.
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This proposal doesn't make sense; assuming the best of the authors I can only assume they haven't really thought through what they're trying to build. But you can not build an attestation method that simultaneously improves the web substantially for your own users over non-attestation methods, but that also magically does not hurt the web for any of your competitors who don't get those improvements.
And holdbacks only make those goals even more contradictory: because privacy, paywalls, and logins will still affect Chrome if it decides randomly that it's not going to attest to the NYT for the duration of today. The only aspect that this makes sense for is specifically user annoyances; and where annoyances are concerned an attestation method that excludes most mainstream users on unmodified devices from annoyances while leaving niche browsers out is an invitation for websites to discriminate against those browsers -- holdbacks change nothing about that situation.
You can't tell me this is about discouraging fingerprinting in the same comment that you tell me that you're going to guarantee that sites will still need to build fingerprinting solutions and will still need to use those solutions even on participating browsers.
This is my conclusion too.
Regarding alternative browsers, the "explainer" says that all browsers on a platform would be able to be attested. But this doesn't really matter, because support for arbitrary browser extensions nullifies all the trust requirements identified at the start of the document.
In other words, the moment a browser hits the Play store which both supports WEI and allows arbitrary extensions, sites relying on WEI will start ignoring it if it's sent from browsers other than Chrome.
> WEI prevents ecosystem lock-in through hold-backs
> We had proposed a hold-back to prevent lock-in at the platform level. Essentially, some percentage of the time, say 5% or 10%, the WEI attestation would intentionally be omitted, and would look the same as if the user opted-out of WEI or the device is not supported.
So this avoids the DRM or blocking certain browsers issue. Brilliant. I’m not entirely certain but I think this avoids the main issues which people had with the proposal.
I still think a lot of people will not read this and react with vitriol but I would like to expect more from hacker news, as a forum where people don’t simply downvote opinions they disagree with.
I haven't reviewed the proposal enough to see how they implemented that, and if it was done in a cryptographic way that prevents changing to 100%, then that could work. But the fact remains that control of our browsing computing environment is diminishing under this proposal.
I think if it were changed to be 100% then it would be problematic. Also it seems the proposal writer would also agree that some form of opt out is required to make it viable so as to not forbid unknown clients.
I think its important to stay away from considering potential “what ifs” that completely defy the intent of the spec. For an example of why this isn’t effective discourse, we could have a potential addition to the spec to explicitly block users from certain countries. That’s not great but also its easy to understand why its not worth debating that point (even though it does sound scary).
In other words, developers of web apps who want to know certain difficult-to-fake facts about a client's browser would not be able to rely on WEI with holdback (by design) and would be obliged to implement all the same invasive techniques they perform now -- but now just to apply them to 5-10% of users. So it doesn't save developers any time. Does it help users? It doesn't seem like it, for two reasons. Firstly, while it's nice to know that there's only a 1 in 20 chance that my browser will be fingerprinted on a given site, that means that if I browse for any reasonable length of time and visit enough sites I will certainly be fingerprinted, and my information shared with whatever ad networks the site is using. Secondly, if developers are going to implement browser fingerprinting anyway, why not just apply it to everyone as an extra signal? Sites don't take heat for fingerprinting users now, why would they care?
In summary, the holdback idea seems to be at odds with the rest of the proposal, and the only reason it sounds attractive is because it nullifies the whole thing.
The TLDR is that I don't see how I'm supposed to believe that this discourages sites from using invasive fingerprinting techniques if those sites are essentially required by holdbacks to still have those invasive fingerprinting techniques at the ready: and 1 in 10 requests even from a browser that implements WEI will still be subjected to those fallback techniques, so your browser/device is still basically guaranteed to be fingerprinted by any site you visit regularly.
You can't discourage the development of something and require it at the same time.
And if the experience of non-participating browsers is so much worse that it's obviously better to implement WEI, then we're right back to the same DRM and competition questions that we had before.
If holdbacks are rare enough that sites can ignore them (or statistically filter them out and determine if a browser actually implements the spec), then those sites don't need to have a fallback mechanism and we're right back to DRM. However, if holdbacks are common enough that sites can't ignore them (and if they can't statistically determine whether or not holdbacks are holdbacks or a non-implementing browser), then everyone is still going to be subjected to the fallback techniques that Google says it's trying to discourage.
>Holdback
>To protect against both risks, we are evaluating whether attestation signals must sometimes be held back for a meaningful number of requests over a significant amount of time (in other words, on a small percentage of (client, site) pairs, platforms would simulate clients that do not support this capability). Such a holdback would encourage web developers to use these signals for aggregate analysis and opportunistic reduction of friction, as opposed to a quasi-allowlist: A holdback would effectively prevent the attestation from being used for gating feature access in real time, because otherwise the website risks users in the holdback population being rejected.
>Although a holdback would prevent the attestation signal from being used for per-request enforcement decisions, there remains immense value for measurement in aggregate populations.
>However, a holdback also has significant drawbacks. In our use cases and capabilities survey, we have identified a number of critical use cases for deterministic platform integrity attestation. These use cases currently rely on client fingerprinting. A deterministic but limited-entropy attestation would obviate the need for invasive fingerprinting here, and has the potential to usher in more privacy-positive practices in the long-term.
>We ask for feedback from the community group on the idea of a holdback, and are very interested in alternative suggestions that would allow both goals to be met.
To me this is very clearly stating there needs to be some mechanism that forces website developers to not block access based on the results at attestation so as to allow clients to opt out. I’m not seeing the “maybe we could this,” interpretation, instead I’m seeing “we need to do something to allow client opt out, here’s one such way (with issues)”
So, does that mean that sites would need to fallback to existing practices for these users (or for custom forks)? So, these users get the worse ux and that's considered "supporting custom browsers"? Now sites can spend less time and resources on detection, but wait...what about the 5-10%? So IT departments will be less likely to spend precious dev time and funding on improving detection due the overall risk reduction. I'm not sure that's a net win.
US:
https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/report-antitrust-violation
antitrust@ftc.gov
EU:
https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust/contact_en
comp-greffe-antitrust@ec.europa.eu
UK:
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/tell-the-cma-about-a-competition-or-market-problem
general.enquiries@cma.gov.uk
India:
https://www.cci.gov.in/antitrust/
https://www.cci.gov.in/filing/atd
Yeah, hopefully you can sleep better telling yourself that.
> An owner of this repository has limited the ability to comment to users that have contributed to this repository in the past.
Fucking joke.
On my phone this is collapsed and hard to find by default.