Stay skeptical. Stay secure.
It is the digital equivalent of a deadbolt on a glass door—it won’t stop a determined thief, but it will stop the casual invasion of your privacy by every ad network, data broker, and lazy developer who currently treats your consent as a free resource. waaa-205
We may hate it for the first six months. Then we’ll wonder how we ever lived without it. Stay skeptical
The “waaa” in its name was originally an internal joke at the GDIF: the sound a user makes when they realize they have to think before clicking. The “205” is the revision number where they finally got it right. We may hate it for the first six months
— The Tech Horizon Team Note to the reader: As of this writing, waaa-205 is a speculative proposal (draft-ietf-waaa-205). No live implementation exists. But the fact that you believed it might says everything about the state of digital consent today.
Published: October 11, 2024 Reading Time: 6 minutes
At first glance, “waaa-205” looks like a typo—a cat walking across a keyboard, or the sound of a frustrated user slamming their fists down after an error message. But inside the closed-door meetings of the Global Digital Identity Federation (GDIF), that string of characters has been the most whispered acronym of the year.