Google is working on a system to fight fraud and make the internet “more private and safe,” but it’s just come in for some blistering criticism from software engineers behind the Vivaldi web browser. According to them, it’s a “dangerous” idea that could lead to greater surveillance of ordinary people.
The subject of this kerfuffle is Google’s Web Environment Integrity project, or WEI. Its purpose, Google says, is to stymy bad actors by providing a piece of code on a website that can be checked with a trusted attestor (such as Google) to ensure the visitor is who they say they are. That could prevent cheating in games, for example, or ensure that ads are being properly served to readers.
The problem, critics assert, is that those same measures could be used to hamstring ad blockers, block browsers that compete with Google Chrome, or otherwise limit lawful web browsing activities.
Ben Wiser, a software developer working on the scheme, responded to the criticism on GitHub by saying that WEI 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.”
Yet not everyone agrees. Posting on the company’s blog, Vivaldi developer Julien Picalausa said “The details are nebulous, but the goal seems to be to prevent ‘fake’ interactions with websites of all kinds. While this seems like a noble motivation, and the use cases listed seem very reasonable, the solution proposed is absolutely terrible and has already been equated with DRM for websites, with all that it implies.”
If any browser or user behavior doesn’t please Google, Picalausa argues, it runs the risk of simply being excluded or restricted in some way thanks to the enormous amount of power such a scheme could concentrate in an attestor’s hands. And that could be bad news for the open principles of the web.
Speaking to The Register, Vivaldi CEO Jon von Tetzchner explained that “A big part of the reason why there is a problem is the surveillance economy … the solution to the surveillance economy seems to be more surveillance.”
They continued by explaining that when they worked on the Opera browser, developers had to hide the browser’s identity in order to get Google Docs to work properly. The concern, von Tetzchner said, was that WEI could represent a similar problem for third-party browsers.
In their GitHub post, however, Wiser argues that WEI is not designed to single out individual browsers or extensions and that it does not penalize browsers that try to hide their identity. They also insist that the goal of the project is to balance user privacy with fraud prevention and to improve results in both areas.
But whether WEI can satisfy the critics is another matter. It’s clear that many people object to an internet where powerful institutions can judge a user’s worthiness based on a handful of opaque factors. It seems that this battle is far from over.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?
Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind.
The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year).
Two residents of Chicago have filed a lawsuit in the US over claims that robots run by Coco Robotics and Serve Robotics captured their facial and hand measurements without consent, bringing renewed attention to the food delivery robots. The cases raise a troubling question: If a robot delivers food to your door, can it also be gathering sensitive information about you?
According to a report by The Associated Press, the proposed class-action lawsuits were filed in Cook County on Oct. 9 and allege violations of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act. The complaints claim that the robots’ cameras and LiDAR sensors captured information on customers’ faces and hands as they approached the machines to pick up their orders. Both have denied the allegations.