Privacy

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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.

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If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
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Please, do not use Brave. (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by eya@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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I have seen many people in this community either talking about switching to Brave, or people who are actively using Brave. I would like to remind people that Brave browser (and by extension their search engine) is not privacy-centric whatsoever.

Brave was already ousted as spyware in the past and the company has made many decisions that are questionable at best. For example, Brave made a cryptocurrency which they then added to a rewards program that is built into the browser to encourage you to enable ads that are controlled by Brave.

Edit: Please be aware that the spyware article on Brave (and the rest of the browsers on the site) is outdated and may not reflect the browser as it is today.

After creating this cryptocurrency and rewards program, they started inserting affiliate codes into URL's. Prior to this they had faked fundraising for popular social media creators.

Do these decisions seem like ones a company that cares about their users (and by extension their privacy) would make? I'd say the answer is a very clear no.

One last thing, Brave illegally promoted an eToro affiliate program making a fortune from its users who will likely lose their money.

Edit: To the people commenting saying how Brave has a good out-of-the-box experience compared to other browsers, yes, it does. However, this is not a warning for your average person, this is a warning for people who actively care about their privacy and don't mind configuring their browser to maximize said privacy.

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[–] elias_griffin@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Spyware is a bit of a stretch. However, let's talk about Firefox. Mozilla Corporation is a Billion Dollar Corporation that is tied at the hip to Google and uses 115+ servers to track every single thing you do.

Chromium explicitly uses shared memory and is technically able to write and execute not only shared data from private/incognito to regular windows or tabs but adjacent processes. You can search for mmap in the Chromium repo or try to use Chromium with FreeBSD or GhostBSD sysctl.conf set with kern.elf64.allow_wx = 0 - it won't run.

The Precise Geolcation Timeout for Firefox is 68 years.

[–] Tynox@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

Well. I get the rating criteria of this website. But it's useful of adding telemetry to learn crashes and feature usage. If we all obey these criteria, we would need to read every line of codes and build it by ourselves. That would be the safest way of living a digital life.

[–] eyr@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago (17 children)

I hate Brendan Eich, I hate the constant annoyances of Brave adding cards and sponsored backgrounds, I hate the dominance of Chromium, and I hate cryptocurrency.

But this is a fight I've lost.

I'm one of those insufferable Linux nerds who has spent $50+hours/month setting up a Nextcloud VPS, calling my friends Nazi-adjacent for using Twitter, etc. I'm horribly opinionated about software. I WANT everyone to use Firefox.

But I just don't have the spare time for Firefox anymore.

I've had irreconcilable, breaking issues with vanilla Firefox installs on almost every major desktop and mobile OS (excluding KaiOS and Apple WatchOS) every time I tried to switch to it during the past few years. This is not exaggeration.

From crashing because it can't handle keyboard-arrow down on iPadOS, lacking good built-in adblock controls (like Brave Shields) on Android and iOS, to being unable to load hCaptcha on desktop even after hours of user.js flitching. This is on top of the inconvenience of not having a good alternative to Chromium's Profile UI, the inconvenience of needing to test on Chrome when doing webdev, etc.

Brave is a putrid steaming pile of shit, but it's the best choice I've found. This post exaggerates a lot of the very real issues Brave has. This isn't praise for Brave, but rather an indictment on the state of browsing and personal-computing.

I write here very sparingly. With this comment, I hope someone will tell me I'm an idiot who's missing a wonderful browser out there.

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