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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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
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Please, do not use Brave. (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Also, and I hate to defend a homophobe here, but if we're going back to the details...

It all sprang up because he gave $1000 to the Prop 8 campaign for banning same sex marriage in California.

Scummy, to be sure, but it's not like he orchestrated the whole campaign or fully financed them. $1000 is barely enough to pay for one TV ad to play exactly one time on a local California TV station. I understand, yes, that when you add that to the rest of the donations, it was a juggernaut, but it still felt a little like punishing someone for having different politics. I also understand that it would be hard to work under someone like that knowing what his politics are, and questioning if that was going to impact fellow LGBT employees. Super valid reasons to be upset that he was put in the top leadership position.

His politics are shitty, to be sure, but a single $1000 donation definitely always seemed a little overblown to me. Especially since he chose to resign after just 11 days, while Mozilla had tried to convince him to stay on in a different role. No one in leadership roles stepped down over him, he made the choice to save the organization instead of himself. That at least showed some sense of humility. So I don't know, not the greatest guy, and his current trajectory with Brave hasn't been so great either, but he at least showed decorum in that situation.

However, that situation also put Mozilla on the defensive, having to put out a FAQ about how they weren't turning into an activist organization, or how you didn't have to ascribe to and agree on every political issue to work at Mozilla.

It was just bad business all around.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks for clearing everything up along of other threads always just said he was homophobic and that's the only reason to not use brave.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

No problem. I remember being mildly irked about it at the time, because while I disagree with his choice to make that donation to that group, and understand the feelings of LGBT people working at Mozilla and how knowing his politics impacted them... He handled the public response to it professionally. He didn't double down like conservative politicians these days and start shouting about "gays are groomers" or something. He owned it and stepped away, which should at least speak to him not being completely homophobic and able to take ownership of how his personal politics affected others. You see so little of that these days, that when someone acts professionally after perceived wrongdoing, it seems sad when people don't recognize it.

Also, I never saw any news of him being proven to have made any discriminatory moves while in Mozilla at all. I could be wrong, but I don't remember employee complaints of being treated differently before the news of his donation broke. Like I said, I can understand how that news can change how you feel about your boss, but if your boss never made an outward show of it in a work environment and a news report on his political donations is what it took for you to know his politics... it means he was probably being pretty fucking professional at work and trying to not let his personal politics infect how he treated his coworkers and employees. *shrugs

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

Prop 8 was also awhile ago so it's possible he changed his mind. People forget how common it was to be shitty on this issue in the 2000's. The public consensus only flipped in like 2013.

I have no evidence either way though

That said, Brave is worse software than Firefox imo so it's a moot point.