this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
64 points (97.1% liked)
Technology
85719 readers
4145 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
How? If an agent browses the web through that session, then how can you reasonably "assert" that?
What does that mean? Some creepy website that forces one to verify their "personhood" (by scanning one's face for instance), that issues "trust me bro, it's anonymous" tokens to a specific browser. And then the user is expected to present these unique identifiers at other websites, like there's no possibility these can be passed back onto the issuer, and therefore re-identify the session-user?
Yeah, and who is pushing for this change? Right, Google among other AI companies. You just got to love companies creating "solutions" for problems they themselves are, at least in part, responsible for.
Ah, thankfully we can trust Mozilla to protect the privacy-community's interests... I mean, they certainly haven't made controversial decisions is recent times.
Apparently a legitimate server gets to issue tokens to you that verify you're a real person and not just a spambot approximating one. How this works in practice is apparently cryptographic magic (which I won't question here, but IIRC can be easier to pinpoint your identity on its own if a smaller group of people receive these tokens). But the magic isn't as big of an issue as the people issuing those assurances, and how centralized they are. Which is a bit frightening in its own right.
One thing's for sure: Google, in concert with two browser manufacturers dependent on Google for their existence, cannot convince me they have created something cryptographically secure on their own. (And the article makes it clear that this won't replace identity tracing for any website or ad network that's realized that "unethical" and "profitable" are nearly synonymous).