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] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Honestly, even the crypto part of Brave was a cool idea. Back when it was in beta, I was sending various websites and GitHub users 'tips', and they were able to cash out. It was genuinely supposed to be a new way to monetize the web (they later made the tips automatic based on how long you spent on each webpage), but, yeah.. Too many people didn't see the vision, and they got too much hate, so I'm pretty sure that whole program is axed now.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (28 children)

What should I use on android?

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (15 children)

I used to use Firefox but have been using Brave cause I was getting tired of having to open Edge every time there would be an addon or tool that was Chrome exclusive. So unless there's other options for privacy focused chromium browsers I'm just gonna stick with brave.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Used to use Brave, but it became more and more bloated as time went on. Also, I realized that I wasn't opposing Google as I wanted, but choosing an alternative of Google, as brave is still based on chromium. I enjoy Firefox very much now (don't know about the performance issues people talk about at all cause it seems better than all chrome, brave, opera, and opera GX I used in the past) although I'm looking into even further simplifying and privatizing that. Any suggestions for modified Firefox browsers that keep the functionality would be appreciated.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I use Librewolf, I've enjoyed it and it's very privacy-centric.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

What is the issue exactly with their search engine?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (8 children)

I would be very curious what other browsers people recommend. I use Brave solely because of the profile feature it offers, which for my use case is an order of magnitude better than Firefox’s containers. Is there something more private/better than Brave that still has profiles?