this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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[–] voluble@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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, for the sake of verifying their humanity for website owners and advertisers. 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?