PACT: Anonymous Credentials for the Web – Mozilla Hacks
6 points by brn
6 points by brn
So, let me get this straight... companies that are profiting from AI crawlers (Google, Cloudflare, Mozilla, Microsoft) came up with a thing they promise will solve the crawling problem, by letting Real Browsers (read: sanctioned browsers) build a kind of reputation so sites can verify they're not crawlers.
Assuming everyone would run this, and noone would abuse it, it might even help! It's allegedly anonymous too! Whee!
Until then, this is completely useless. There's also a much better way to address the problem: make aggressive crawling, the use of residential proxies, and stuff like that illegal, and aggressively make them pay. Fix the problem at the root, rather than applying Yet Another Kludge that doesn't work.
AI companies keep coming up with stupid ideas.
It also goes without saying that having a “guarantee” that a user/visitor is a human is very beneficial for advertisers.
While I agree that PACT and aggressive crawling are an issue, there is no way to solve this on the standard internet. You can expect the things that are exposed publicly to be dirty and have downtime/slowness and it'll be fine unless you're using something like AWS.