Privacy
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
Does this all matter though? Afaik the browser if fully open source, even the crypto stuff so all the shady stuff would be detected (and has as in your examples). Like all of the issues you linked at this point are years in the past. I don't use Brave personally but it being completely FOSS is a huge plus even if the company itself might be weird. On the other hand you have something like Vivaldi that looks like "the good guys" but you'll always have to trust them as well because they're not fully open source.
I use FF but you just cannot deny that using a Chromium based browser has many security advantages over Gecko, especially on mobile. I takes Mozilla seemingly years and years to implement security features like Chromium. They don't put the necessary priority behind this.
The issue is wider than Brave. Nowadays, companies build uncritical communities around their products.
If you try to be critical, you loose the community in which you're involved on one side. And, if you are critical from the outside, "you don't understand" like in the "you're not the choose one".
I'll keep using and promoting it. I consider it better than Mozilla/FF anyway. Deal with it and stop telling people what they should and shouldn't do.
its open source tho, show me the spyware and i will belive you
How about the Opera Browser?
Proprietary, controlled by the Chinese Government, spyware, Chromium.
I used to use Brave, then used Bromite but that got abandoned. I think there's another fork of it, but ultimately I just use Firefox which has worked better for me overall.
Browsers are a big attack vector for exploits and security is very important. Firefox releases patches regularly and I don't have to worry about it being abandoned like some others. I disabled whatever telemetry / sponsored stuff they have enabled by default and feel it's a good balance of security & privacy + doesn't have the DRM crap chromium is trying to add.
Their extension support is nice too.
Oh no, a shady, unknown neocities site is telling me to not trust my browser! Yes, I can use Firefox, uBlock and uMatrix, except on iOS, where I can’t do that, and that is where Brave does a good job. I am really tired of those „Brave baaad“ posts. Look guys, unless you are using Linux you might want to direct your attention at the huge, morally flexible company that does collect your data, no matter what browser you choose.
a shady, unknown neocities site is telling me to not trust my browser
Spyware Watchdog has been a resource for checking browser's for a very long time. It's not longer maintained, which is why I said "in the past".
uMatrix
The fact you even bring up this dead extension...
except on iOS, where I can’t do that
You can use AdGuard and Safari, but if you're on iOS you've already given up any semblance of privacy in the first place.
Oh, yes, because Android is so trustworthy, right? Google would never turn evil, after all. But I suppose you are sharing your wisdom from the coziness of a Windows desktop.
Not reading all that, still sticking to based Brave 😎
I used to use Firefox but have been using Brave cause I was getting tired of having to open Edge every time there would be an addon or tool that was Chrome exclusive. So unless there's other options for privacy focused chromium browsers I'm just gonna stick with brave.
Why are there daily posts against Brave but not against other browsers? Is Google more trustworthy than Brave?
Newsflash: everything that isn't free and entirely open source is generally spyware these days.
It's amazing how we pilloried RealPlayer and burned its parent company to the fucking ground over two decades ago for far less egregious transgressions than what we now let Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc get away with.
I would be very curious what other browsers people recommend. I use Brave solely because of the profile feature it offers, which for my use case is an order of magnitude better than Firefox’s containers. Is there something more private/better than Brave that still has profiles?
I will
If you need a Chromium derivative, then Brave is probably the best choice. It's open-source, and includes ad blocking. Just don't use its crypto token.
I prefer Firefox over Brave, but sometimes I might need a Chromium derivative for a particular site.
Why should I trust Mozilla over Brave? Just because Mozilla is a nonprofit subsidiary doesn't mean that they don't have an incentive to make money for their profit handling corporate division, the Mozilla Corporation. I tried playing around with Firefox and not having the option to directly add a less-used search engine than the ones given without extensions was pretty sketchy to me. All of the complaints people have about Brave like ads and the weird crypto thing are very configurable in the settings, and I have a lot less compatibility issues compared to Firefox. Also, the source linked claiming all of this is a sketchy Neocities site that anyone could have made that doesn't even prove why Brave isn't private. I get that people are loyal to their favorite browsers but this is silly. If you really want to be private, use the Tor network, but all browsers and extensions need to track you in some degree to function.
How about we just let users use what they want? I don't use Brave, but it has some legitimate anti-fingerprinting tech.