On: New headless Chrome has been released and has a ne...

[notatoad]

i love the contrast in these comments. on the one hand you have all the people arguing that headless chrome is unethical because websites need to be able to block bot traffic, and on the other you have actual humans saying they try as hard as they can to behave like a bot.

[pritambaral → notatoad]

> ... actual humans saying they try as hard as they can to behave like a bot.

Blaming humans for desiring privacy is bad. No one here is "trying to behave like a bot".

Exaggerated example: "Oh, you don't want to show me, a random stranger on the internet, your ID? You are behaving like a crook!"

[notatoad → pritambaral]

i'm not blaming people for wanting privacy. i'm just saying that if you value privacy, you can't also value blocking bots, because in order to block a bot you have to collect enough information to violate the real people's desire for privacy.

and there seems to be significant overlap between the people who think enabling bots is morally wrong, and people who think fingerprinting is morally wrong. if you value privacy, you have to value privacy for all web users even before you've collected enough data to determine whether that web user is a real person or not.