Can someone shed some light for me? I’m a noob and I’m not sure I understand what is being proposed by google here. From what I can tell, they’re proposing a cryptographically signed token that details information about a website user’s ‘environment’, which I take to mean, their device OS and browser information. Isn’t this sort of information already collected when a user visits a webpage, and doesn’t google (or whomever) already collect and use this data (and more) for fingerprinting? How is this new proposal different, and something to be specifically concerned about?

I know there are anti-fingerprinting browser privacy addons that spoof this information, or prevent its collection. Is the concern that these tools will become inoperable?

For the record I don’t like google or any company collecting any fingerprinting information, but it’s already being done widely and in an unregulated manner, isn’t it?

Using the proposed “Web Environment Integrity” means websites can select on which devices (browsers) they wish to be displayed, and can refuse service to other devices. It binds client side software to a website, creating a silo’d app. Web Environment Integrity on GitHub This penalizes platforms on which the preferred client side software is not available.

From Young-Lord/fight-for-the-open-web.

This will also affect all the Chromium based clients (Chrome, obviously, Brave, Vivaldi…)

USE FIREFOX(Librewolf), PEOPLE. SUPPORT THE OPENWEB

The thought here is that, a website could be programmed to, for example, only be accessible to users of chrome, correct? Other than google itself, why would any website want to do such a thing? Is the idea that google is trying to bring users to chrome, by blocking google services on other browsers? That could be really transformative for the web, because then you’d have microsoft doing the same thing with edge, apple doing the same thing with opera, other companies like fb or whatever launching their own bespoke ‘browsers’ to access their services. Will users actually put up with the degree of fragmentation that this move might bring? Won’t it just push users to the ‘old internet’ where you can simply go to a website and interact with it?

Sorry, I’m kind of talking out loud here trying to wrap my head around this. I see people grousing about DRM and ads, and I’m struggling to connect all the dots.

Other than google itself, why would any website want to do such a thing

Web devs can be pretty lazy and only want to support Chrome anyway. If Chrome is the only browser offering certain features (“proof” that user is human, potentially getting rid of adblockers altogether, etc), that’s a good excuse to finally just stop supporting Firefox and Safari.