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Comment by Georgelemental | Hacker News Reader

There is no right to lie. There is a right to remain silent. That is what "Web Environment Integrity" threatens.

There is a right to remain silent. That is what "Web Environment Integrity" threatens.

Google's WEI doesn't threaten your right to be silent.

Based on Google's previous behavior, if your web site doesn't go along with its plan, it will be more than happy to silence/delist/derank it.

That's the thing though. Even though Google's search quality has diminished, and they attempt to enforce things like WEI or other abjectly terrible things, they remain the market leader in search, and this threat still holds a lot of weight. The amount of inertia to go against this change feels Herculean, and I'm honestly not sure how we would go about educating the vast majority of the Internet's user base to care about it.

Sure, as the technologists we are, we can see just how dangerous this can be, and why it's offensive to even consider. Without getting the masses on board though, we're pretty outmatched and outgunned.

You need to include the first phrase. It is the right to lie that is being threatened.

It threatens the right to not disclose certain information in your user agent.

I disagree, you have the right to set your user-agent to anything you’d like, or nothing at all.

i found a page with some helpful suggestions for user-agent strings that could be adopted by default , ideally at ^scale^.

Google Crawlers and User Agent Strings – 2023 List

https://www.stanventures.com/blog/googlebot-user-agent-strin...

I am not sure where you are getting this as a right, because things like fraud are illegal. It might be good policy but where is the right?

In American law, the right to speak is assumed. It is the lack of a right to speech that is the exception. There are only a handful of categories of unprotected speech, which can be easily enumerated, and lies aren't one of them.

Fraud, defamation, perjury, and obstruction of justice are illegal. That's a much narrower restriction than a ban on lies.

Agreed there is no explicitly enumerated right, but in the context of computing, it is not illegal for a computer to transmit “untrue” information. Fraud is a significantly higher bar. I am not a cyber-lawyer.

In the U.S., most rights are not explicitly enumerated. People are assumed to have all conceivable rights, and the restrictions must be explicitly enumerated. There is no law against lying in general.

There is, however, an explicitly enumerated right to freedom of speech. There are only a handful of recognized categories of non-protected speech. Lying isn't one of them.

You cannot keep me from lying. You can only hold me accountable if my lies do harm. So I would take it as a "natural right" even though I realize those are contended.

> That is what "Web Environment Integrity" threatens.

This is the important part.

Actually, it’s not a right to remain silent that is threatened. It’s a threat to refuse to let anybody else speak to you or you to anybody else unless you first give Google enough info that they can silence you.

There is no right to remain silent in the United States. Courts can compel testimony.

> There is no right to lie.

Tell that to the police.

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