Link for anybody who wasn’t aware of Sam Altman’s attempted surveillance platform

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_(blockchain)

This is terrible news.

Age verification is code for personal identification.

This is good writing. Register-level, even.

In promoting their developer registration program, Google purports:

Our recent analysis found over 50 times more malware from internet-sideloaded sources than on apps available through Google Play.

We haven’t seen this recent analysis — or any other supporting evidence — but the “50 times” multiple does certainly sound like great cause for distress (even if it is a surprisingly round number). But given the recent news of “224 malicious apps removed from the Google Play Store after ad fraud campaign discovered”, we are left to wonder whether their energies might better be spent assessing and improving their own safeguards rather than casting vague disparagements against the software development communities that thrive outside their walled garden.

I don’t think it’ll even affect Chrome users. In a best case scenario, maybe they will un-roll-out all their extra attribution APIs… but I doubt that.

Privacy Sandbox gave them an excuse to add extra surveillance onto both Android and Chrome and I don’t think they will ever abandon that.