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 :)
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[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
Librewolf?
I've been using that for a while since I ditched Chrome, and anecdotally it seems like it hits a pretty good sweet spot of "privacy-protecting to such an extent that I notice little annoyances as I browse the web, but they're all trivial and easily bearable, which probably means it's doing quite a lot to try to protect me."
Unsure why DDG isn't mentioned but they work well for me across devices.
Aside from people objections to built-in cryptocurrency (which can be disabled) and founders own personal beliefs — unrelated to browser and internet.. Brave is not terrible.
I'm using Firefox myself, but people cancelling him for what he did privately with his own money — years ago is just strange.
I recommend Brave when you need a Chromium-based browser. In the Chromium world you will not find anything better than Brave.
Of course, I do not recommend to use Brave as a primary browser... just for these cases when something doesn't work in hardened Firefox ESR. I stress on hardened, because regular out of the box Firefox is simply not enough. And I stress on the ESR version of Firefox, since it's an enterprise-grade browser which (once hardened) will serve you well for at least 9 months.
TBH, I am sad that Brave didn't go without its own controversies and bloat. Still, it remains the only Chromium-based browser that de-Googles soooooo much cr#p in the Chromium code so that you can browse with peace of mind.
Vivaldi is definitely a no-go for me, since it's not open source. Period. Whatever their marketing department says, being closed source is a red flag. Why? Because they can inject shady stuff even in the UI! "We are not fully open source because someone will steal our work"... hilarious. I bet that's exactly the same reason why Chome is not open source! Somebody is going to steal Google's work (irony & laughter).
Probably indeed Vivaldi is safe to use with some settings disabled, but if such a critical piece of software like a browser is not open source, then nobody can verify if some UI elements (like settings) really do anything or not. This problem is especially true for Android (iPhone is waaaay worse) where Google Firebase is lurking everywhere, even when you "disable" some settings in a given app. The only way to be safe there is to use something like Proton VPN or some DNS-based blocklists (they carry their own privacy risk with them tho...) to nuke Firebase on a device level.