Is Brave Browser currently as privacy disrespecting as some say?
Is Brave Browser currently as privacy disrespecting as some say?
I care about my privacy, though I like it's UI. Is it really as bad as some say?
Be careful, Brave marketing team is well known for disguising themselves as users and promote their bloated crapware via comments.
They overdid it in 4chan and ended up alienating the entire community.
Then they moved to Reddit but people already started seeing Brave for what they really are, a scummy company that has been caught redhanded way to many times to be trusted.
Now they are here on Lemmy, desperately trying to get more chumps under their ad machine before BAT hits 0 and their advertising partners lose all interest.
Just say no to Brave, there are way better browsers out there, with real privacy, that won't make you look like a hateful brainwashed-by-politics piece of shit.
YES, IT IS!
You should NOT trust Brave to not play fast and loose with your privacy. They already operate an advertising network (it operates on those stupid little BAT tokens) and they DO inject ads and affiliate links.
I strongly recommend Firefox1 or Librewolf.
1 - You must install plugins and apply user.js fixes yourself to properly harden Firefox completely against tracking; but this is doable.
It's literally just a coat of paint on google chrome. You might as well install internet explorer toolbars until an unknown browser appears on your desktop and use that.
Brave is an alternative. There are better alternatives but its better than chrome or edge
Yes.
No, brave is not bad for your privacy. There has been some controversie but no dealbreaker so far imo.
If you're on mobile I think brave has hands down the best UX (not necessarily UI but I like it a lot), on desktop I recommend firefox, which has a lot of custom themes to choose from (https://firefoxcss-store.github.io).
I personally like and use https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix
They had their ups and downs.
There was that thing where some domains where whitelisted from blocking, don't know whether it was cookies or something else. Not great, but easily explained by not wanting to break stuff for unexpecting users, maybe bad communication. Shouldn't happen when you go privacy first, but that was resolved quickly after being discovered at least.
There was the time when they injected affiliate links when visiting some sites, to generate some revenue of course. They overdid it and replaced affiliate links of other people I think, but again they changed it after the community complained. I don't know whether that's optional now or completely gone. In any case, no harm was done to the users in this instance.
One thing you can definitely hold against them to this day is their CEO. He supported anti-queer legislature in the past and was dismissed as Firefox CEO (CTO? Something very high up at least) for that reason. He did apologize for it and afaik didn't continue supporting that kinda stuff, but you never know.
Imo the browser as it is right now is pretty good and unique in what it has to offer. The biggest issue really is a lack of trust by the community.
I don't know what people are saying about Ecosia (actually I'd never heard of it before until now). But right at the very top of their Privacy Policy:
For a growing number of users we can now provide Google results and advertisements. In order to supply these results and ads, Google requires a cookie to be set on your browser and access to your device’s local storage to store information. We will ask for your consent before doing this and if you do not agree, we will provide non-personalized results from Microsoft Bing.
Seems like Google results must be personalised. Not looking for non-personalised results either:
In order to provide non-personalized Microsoft Bing results and ads, we are contractually obliged to implement Microsoft Clarity to capture how you use and interact with our website through behavioral metrics, as well as sharing your IP address and search terms. This behavioral data is captured in individual search sessions and is not tied to a user profile unless you consent. The processing of this data is necessary for the provision of our service. Although Ecosia does not use this information, it is used by Microsoft Bing for site and advertising optimization, as well as fraud protection.
Ecosia are very clear here that usage data is used by Bing for ad optimisation and "fraud protection".
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They don't like the guy.
AFAIK no, but if someone has to say something about privacytests's results (bad methodology? inconclusive?) I'm interested to know
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It isn't. Brave doesn't track you
Not at all.
The brave criticisms you see are mostly hot takes about crypto(icrypto jokes are super coool as of '20) but brave(foss) is as good or better than Firefox, IE or safari in terms of privacy.
Firefox can nearly match that privacy with their options, but if you like brave, easier to stick with that.