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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Of course it is complex. A few points:

    If you ban a party in Germany, it’s automatically bans all „clones“ of that party, and all of its members in high functions can’t participate in these clones. Failure to comply would lead to an immediate ban of the clone. While I agree that eventually, a new far right with other people will probably form, it would take years for them to reorganize and they would have to be extremely careful. I believe that a ban would probably yield at least 10 years of far-right free politics.

    Appeasement of the far right has failed every time in history, they will cannibalize every attempt to include them in any sort of „rational“ discourse. Banning parties is a lever that exists precisely because of Germany‘s history. IMHO it sends a strong message to all the non-far-right people (of which there are approx. 60-70%) that bullshit will not be tolerated.

    In contrast, doing nothing signals that what the AfD is doing is fine and will move the discourse farther and farther right.

    Stopping funding and preventing them from entering the Parliament is precisely what a ban would do, so I am not sure why the difference is between that and what you are suggesting.



  • 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.










  • 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!