this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
216 points (100.0% liked)

Privacy

789 readers
24 users here now

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

Related communities

Chat rooms

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
top 37 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] genoxidedev1@kbin.social 61 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Wasn't Brave always known to be shady in one way or the other? Which is why I never get why people say "remove Chrome get Brave" in 2023.

[–] 1bluepixel@lemmy.ml 26 points 1 year ago

A crypto company turns out to be shady? Who would have thought!

[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes exactly. This is just yet another of Brave's long history of controversial moves.

Typically, these have been followed by the CEO going on a marketing campaign. The new users drown out the controversy.

[–] Aesthesiaphilia@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

"I don't know why, but it just FEELS wrong" is usually the hallmark of a marketing campaign against something. See: Hillary Clinton.

[–] rolandtb303@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 year ago

ye first time i heard about brave was in a sponsor segment on a youtube video, my first thoughts were "lol another chromium browser? rewards? bar? ok this seems shady as hell" and sure enough it is indeed shady af. the Tor mode had DNS leaks way back (besides who in their right mind would even use tor in a chromium browser), URL injections, brave not giving out BAT, also them spam mailing Brave pamphlets to customers (physical mail too, it was through i think UPS, which idk if that's technically considered a privacy violation, but to me, mailing someone a pamphlet out of the blue when you use their browser without your consent is quite literally a privacy violation, no matter where you got the data from or how you mailed it).

been gladly using firefox ever since version 3, best browser of all time.

[–] Aesthesiaphilia@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

How exactly were they known to be shady?

[–] gengear@lemmy.cafe 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don't think they've been that shady, the worst thing they did was say "we're blocking ads" then said "You can show ads but only through us, and you need a braves token wallet" but else that, I don't think theres much, and when compared to the history of Microsoft and google, which are the major alternatives, that's such a small issue, especially when they also offer so many nice extras.

I mostly use LibreWolf now, at least for my main browser, but I do miss the instant access to internet archive and tor, but I think its worth missing out on, to avoid some of the creep I'm feeling from Brave.

Does anyone have a link to a list of controversy's that Brave has been involved in? I think it'd be good to know, rather than just going of both feeling, and 2 misdeeds.

[–] BlushedPotatoPlayers@terefere.eu 24 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Just lovely, when you think you found a browser that works decently and cares about privacy...

[–] majestictechie@lemmy.fosshost.com 61 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Just use Firefox, it's always been the best out of them for Privacy

[–] Landrin201@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Every time I try to use Firefox I run into the same incredibly annoying issue.

Sometimes tabs will randomly not work. I'll open a new tab, go to, say, Google, and it will just hang, it never loads. Doesn't matter what site I try to load. It happens seemingly randomly. Sometimes it won't happen on the first page load, but the second.

It's the entire reason I witched to brave, because I couldn't figure the problem out and every time I posted to reddit about it I would be told that nothing was wrong and it must be my add-ons, despite the fact it also happened when I un-installed all of them.

It persisted to a new install, too. No idea what caused it and it's so annoying that I don't want to bother trying...

[–] majestictechie@lemmy.fosshost.com 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's a shame. I use FF most of my day for work and I've never had any issues like that. I was thinking of add-ons too, but since you uninstalled them all AND it carried to a new installation.

I use Brave for my personal stuff, but Brave has had some dodgy stuff in recent times and I don't trust other browser's than FF right now.

[–] Landrin201@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah the weirdest part for me was that it carried to a new install; I've NEVER seen another program where that happened. But it happened THREE different times, it 100% carried over, or at the least was so inherent to something in my setup that it started happening again within 2 days of re-installing.

[–] heftig 1 points 1 year ago

Try disabling HTTP/3 (network.http.http3.enable).

[–] Vlyn@lemmy.ml 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Install Firefox (also works on mobile!), add uBlock Origin (also available on mobile!), done.

[–] Logh@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And if you are feeling extra frisky, install noscript to pick and choose what sources of js you are willing to run and/or be terrified/furious of all the non-relevant scripts sites run.

[–] Vlyn@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I actually did that for a while (on my PC at least). Major pain in the ass unfortunately.

Of course it's good to block that crap, but usability takes too much of a nose dive. I do live in the EU though, so when it comes to data protection things have gotten a lot better in the last years.

[–] Logh@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

I’ve been using it for a few years now and by now picking out the scripts for site navigation and finding the relavant cdn is pretty much automatic now. If I find a site that is just an absolute js clusterfuck, I just run it in porno mode and let the scrips loose and hope for the best until I find what I went there for. I even take the time to reject cookies manually as per my right, haha. Maybe it will show up on some stat somewhere, a flaccid message, but a message none the less.

What did you think of the recent deal the EU made with the giants? As an EU citizen I find it concerning, because it might be a slippery slope.

[–] Redcedar@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago

I was suspicious as soon as I saw it runs on Chromium. I can safely assure you, Google is not focusing on privacy features there.

[–] Blizzard@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Vivaldi is awesome. Both for desktop and android.

[–] ReakDuck@lemmy.ml 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Why do people just don't use something like Firefox or any forks of it. Its the only browser which is truly still Open Source

[–] 001100010010@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I use Fennec (for android), maintained by Mozilla and no possible Google-Play shennanigans.

[–] FarLine99@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago
[–] FarLine99@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

yeah, it is such a pain 😥. but hardened firefox 😏

[–] Arotrios@kbin.social 13 points 1 year ago

The more surprising part of this article is that enough people use Brave to create enough of a dataset to train AI.

I have a feeling that in a future AI society, one trained on Brave data would be considered special needs.

[–] tomartiv@lemmy.ml 13 points 1 year ago

I just switch back to good old firefox.

[–] torbjoern@feddit.de 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

ITT: Cryptobros and apologists finding new and creative ways to justify the behaviour of a company, the head of which was ousted from his last position because of crude political views, i.e. not granting people basic rights.

This article is about brave search not the browser.

[–] CashmereWitch@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I am not an expert and I am sincerely asking, but everyone who is recommending Firefox, how do you feel about DuckDuckGo?

[–] ISOmorph@feddit.de 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

DDG is miles ahead of Brave. But the company behind it has a deal with MS to feed them user data. They're transparent about it and the motivation isn't nefarious. But still, it's a thing. Now obviously, FF has deal with google, so I guess it's more of a "pick your poison" situation

[–] Mikelius 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Love it except I can't use it because I don't save cookies to keep the "dark setting" enabled and dark reader doesn't automatically invert it, likely due to them breaking some sort of common html/css standards if I had to guess. Wish they would fix it for accessibility. :(

[–] jonwyattphillips@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] Mikelius 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks! Came back to actually add an edit or reply to mention that I found an issue on darkreader issues with a resolution for putting in a custom filter to unlock origin! Worked perfectly.

https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader/issues/11325

Question in the issues that did come up is... Why are they doing this? Only reason as some others mentioned sounds like it would be for tracking purposes which contradicts what their model is about. Seems like there's no winning search engine for privacy, just the least of all evils? Lol. Glad to at least be back to using it for now.

[–] Zippythezigzag@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

I got a bad feeling about that app when i tried it. Something about it didn't "feel" right. Went crawling right back to firefox after.

[–] Lamy@lemmy.fmhy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

This is important information but it really should be compared to google chrome, safari, edge, and Firefox default settings, which are all bad for privacy, and when combined, make up 99% of browsers.

This article is written like everyone already knows how to install and use librewolf.

[–] Madiator2011@lm.madiator.cloud 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Probably all browsers spy in some way.

[–] master@lem.serkozh.me 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm pretty sure that Lynx does not

[–] metaStatic@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

do you want lynx spy on you? [Yes/No/Always/neVer]