While WEI is thankfully cancelled, it’s not entirely cancelled… They’re planning on making it available still in WebViews with the intention that websites can check if a malicious Android app is trying to do a phishing scheme.
Seems like such a niche “security” feature… what are they really trying to accomplish here? Something seems fishy to me
We did it!
We gotta remain vigilant.
Agreed, but I disagree about the first part. It being only available in webviews can’t really be abused and makes all the difference. Sure they could try to reintroduce all the bad stuff, even if the had cancelled it altogether, but for now this is a success.
You’re completely wrong.
This means that they will implement it, and then it’s only a tiny change to make it available everywhere if they decide to do so later.
The option alone also now also allows people to build stuff that will only work in those WebViews, rejecting to work without the integrity check, which is already a huge loss.
If you are aware of this issue, it is your obligation to tell all of your friends, family, associates and coworkers to stop using Chrome immediately, and try out a new search engine.
It’s the least you can do.
This behaviour by Google is not going to stop. The mask has slipped too many times. They have become the very thing they swore to destroy.
Not many people will be ready to de Google their phones and stop buying their products. It’s the little things that will hurt them the most and show they’ve stepped over a line this last year or so.
For whatever reason I am the least convincing person on earth, and 99% of the time it’s pretty useful shit I’m trying to inform people about and they just want nothing to do with the information. The 1% is when I went full retard and thought GME was going to make me rich instead of much poorer and tried to get others to invest, I’m glad no one listened to me on that one.
this is not cancellation. This is Google taking a step back, and regroup to attack back.
They care about one thing only: Money.
Obviously this is more of a strategic retreat and nothing else. It’s also a very common tactic to push for something crass, pull back, wait a bit and repeat. Most commonly resistance gets weaker each time, because people are people.
Now if anyone thinks they made money with a retreat and won’t try again, because it’s obviously much more lucrative, which stone exactly are you living under?
You are 100% correct. Nothing is won till you make it impossible for Google to push forward or destroy their motivation for trying again later.
Its a common practice to do exactly that. Just demand something very absurd and let people rage about it, then “step back” to “please the masses” while in reality your “step back” idea is the thing you actually wanted to do from the beginning on. But now people are happy about it.
Damn? Really?
As someone who uses GrapheneOS but knows very little about the technical side of things, what implications does this have for the OS? I’ll actually just not use a smartphone anymore if I’m going to be forced back onto the privacy nightmare that is stock Android.
I don’t know about graphene, but doesn’t some android roms allow to use custom ( more private Webview implementations) instead of default ?
They grew thanks to the open internet where everyone let them scrape their website’s content. They can’t let anyone do that again.
Ha, I didn’t know there’s a name for that, but it’s definitely what I assume they’re going to do. My initial reaction was to wonder what they’ll now present as the “reasonable” option to WEI.
Considering they’re rolling it out in Android, maybe they’ll just wait a moment and then integrate it into desktop Chrome as well, just without any of the fanfare?
