Article URL: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2026/06/pact-anonymous-credentials-for-the-web/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48647360 Points: 32 # Comments: 1

This is the technical companion to our update on Distilled, “Keeping the web open and private in the bot era.” Here we take a deeper look at the problem space, the design we’re proposing, and the problems still left to solve. Browse a news site in a private window. Shop at a major retailer with a VPN. Visit a video streaming platform with anti-fingerprinting defenses tuned up. You’ll see the same responses: registration walls, block pages, and endless CAPTCHAs. The message is clear: if we think you might be a bot, you’re not welcome. Websites have valid reasons for wanting to block bots. Bots enable volumetric abuse, abuse that wouldn’t otherwise be feasible if they had to be carried out by humans. For example: SEO comment spam, credential stuffing and DDoSing. Consequently many sites employ dedicated anti-abuse tooling which aims to keep the bots out whilst minimizing friction for human visitors. Unfortunately, that tooling is increasingly failing at both tasks. Browser privacy protections are dismantling the passive signals that anti-abuse systems depended on to identify and distinguish visitors. Meanwhile advances in generative AI have rendered CAPTCHAs ineffective: bots now solve them faster and more reliably than humans. Many sites are switching to more invasive mechanisms and now ask visitors to disclose identifying information, e.g. an email address, a federated login or disabling their VPN. This means greater friction for users, since providing these details on a first visit takes time. It also compromises their privacy, since these details enable the same kinds of cross-site tracking that browser privacy protections were intended to mitigate. This leaves users with a dilemma. The more effectively they protect their privacy, the harder it is for websites to distinguish them from bots and the worse the treatment they receive. Website operators are also suffering. The additional friction they inflict upon well-behaved visitors harms their site, but many are willing to pay the costs if it mitigates volumetric abuse. Browser-based AI agents make this tension more acute. Sites may want to allow agents which are acting on behalf of individual users while blocking agents engaged in volumetric abuse. However, with no effective mechanisms to distinguish the two, websites are opting to block both. That hurts users, who should be free to choose the user agent they use to access the web; it hurts new browsers and agents, which struggle to interoperate; and it hurts sites, which lose legitimate visitors. The consequence is that the web gets worse for everyone. Users get more friction or less privacy or both. Website operators see more volumetric abuse and the friction they add drives away users who would otherwise want to consume their content or services. New user agents struggle to access the same content as conventional browsers.