What many posters in this thread fail to realize is that there is a very good reason why steam hasn’t been hit by the enshittification that otherwise permeates human existence in 2024.

Of course, Gaben as their CEO has the last say in it. And he’s just a good guy. But wait, aren’t there other companies that have good guys as their CEO and yet the enshittification persists?

The profound reason is that Valve is not a publicly traded company. They have no obligation to any investors to make number go up. They are a private company, they can do whatever the fuck they want. If they stay flat and keep paying their employees, that’s totally fine, and there is 0 pressure on them to change anything. THAT‘s why Valve seems like such a different company compared to everything else that’s out there.

Of course it’s still a choice to go public or not, and they have made the right call (for us consumers).

Wouldn’t it be boring if everyone just agreed on everything? :-)

Don’t get me wrong, I am the first one to criticize Google when they mess up, but recently I have observed that piling on Google is just appears to be en vogue. I think it is important to understand what you are criticizing/outraged by, otherwise you are letting yourself be manipulated somewhat too easily.

I, for instance, don’t fully penetrate the WEI proposal, I admit. All the more I am befuddled by the overwhelming news cycle this generates, and I can’t help but wonder … why?

Anyway, when I wrote the top level comment, all other comments were just “suck it google” in various flavors, and I was disappointed by the lack of depth in the discussion.

In the meantime, this has changed, see my edit.

I do not see how my advice applies to my own comment. To me, this proposal is exactly like all other proposals, I don’t really think about it at all, and I don’t have the context or the background knowledge to judge its usefulness.

But okay, if I try to understand it: this seems to be an attempt at stopping the cat-and-mouse game between browser fingerprinting tech and browser obfuscation tech, and instead make it - optionally - possible to identify yourself as a „real“ user. You can opt out, and I sincerely doubt that Google would lock out users that will opt out or use another browser. Why? Because they would be leaving free ad money on the table, and they don’t do that.

So I don’t really see how that changes the ways of the internet, since fingerprinting is being done already, so, I guess, I don’t really care for this proposal one way or the other.

Google does not sell data to advertisers, that is incorrect.

You are correct that Google cross-correlates some data for integrating features, but as I said, you can just go and delete your data, and it will continue to work just fine.

Maybe it’s also useful to remind oneself that you do get lots of services from Google for free - and considering they are free (!), imho, Google is taking about the most ethical approach it economically can. (Ie., they will use your data to tune full integration of their products and serve ads for you, BUT you can always opt out and delete it)

I fail to see how meta and twitter are so much different in the range of products they offer. Meta e.g. operates the larges private messaging app on the planet and they DID sell (or accidentally leak, however you want to put it, see Cambridge analytica) their data.

Makes sense to me!

As pointed out in another comment, the proposal explicitly states that web sites have to function without this feature; and chrome itself will keep it disabled for a random 5% of users.

Isn’t it already effectively very easy to force a specific browser on a website? The explainer touches on that, browser fingerprinting is so powerful to date that you can already easily tell individuals and their browsers apart. What’s changing with this proposal wrt your examples?

Great comment! I don’t understand the proposal well enough to answer that, but I still would like to commend you on taking the time to look into this and writing it up.

From what I can tell, out of all the big tech firms, Google goes to the greatest lengths preserving your privacy. You can even go to your profile settings right now and delete all your data. This was possible even before GDPR, so I am not sure how you get this picture.

As a counterpoint, IMHO Google has the best track record regarding privacy of all the big tech firms. Googles data was never sold, leaked, or abused by employees as far as I can tell.

This is in stark contrast to companies like meta and twitter.

Maybe Google isn’t as good communicating that fact, but what is your reason for the distrust in this particular case?

The explainer explicitly mentions that the proposal allows browser to ignore WEI and the web is intended to work without. It even points out that there will be a continuous group of chrome users of ~5% that have the feature disabled.

If website owners rely on this feature, they are hurting chrome users just as much as other browsers.

I wouldn’t necessarily agree with that. If you are outraged by something, I think it’s unrealistic to expect other people to explain to you why there is nothing to be outraged about. Otherwise you might as well just walk through life outraged by anything.

Rather, it is your responsibility to take a deep breath and ask yourself, what is it really you are concerned about? And if you deem that serious enough, convince others.

Well, looking at these comments, one thing is clear: the discussion is not going to happen here. I don’t think there was even one comment of substance, which is unfortunate, since the explainer in OP reads sincere to me.

Maybe instead of jumping on the „google bad“ bandwagon, it would be helpful if people point out the specific issues that they are seeing with this.

As it stands, we might just take literally any commit to chromium and paste the same comments below it.

Edit: since posting this, the comments have considerably improved, I love some of the discussion. Thanks!