“If someone recommends Brave to you, you should ignore them, because they are wrong.”
I stopped reading here. If you would like to present objective technical arguments, please try not to sound like a 5 year old “I’m right, you’re wrong, blah blah”.
Use Brave or use Firefox. They both work great for privacy, but I find Brave is easier to configure to be private.
When is the last time you saw a thesis that began with "you should ignore them, because they are wrong.”
He had a great opportunity and lots of eyes here from people who use brave to show them how it’s problematic. He started his opinion article with nu’uhhhhhh
Compelling summary: “You’ve been hearing a lot about Brave, maybe you use it yourself, you should look into the company you’re supporting and how they’re turning their back on you before you continue”
Start with privacy issues with tor
Show a historical track record of illegal action add swapping and referrer swapping
Show their shady crypto currency issues. trading out FTX for their own stuff, the FTC/SEC looking into them selling their coin as a security.
Show the CEO is a horrible person.
Make the case that their going to sell your data more unscrupulously than Google or Microsoft.
But no, he’s a horrible journalist that can’t manage to put the critical points first.
Firefox works well enough for me. Never given me any problems or grief. I don’t really understand the fascination with chromium forks or the insistence on using them instead of Mozilla’s engine.
Unfortunately there are enough websites that are broken and don’t work in Firefox… and some of them I just cannot avoid using (company tools, recruitment platforms etc.) because I am position where they can just tell me to use Chrome or GTFO.
I get the company stuff but I honestly can’t think of a single site in any recent history that harassed me about using Firefox. If it does I just look for alternatives or irritably switch to edge or whatever for a couple of minutes. It’s not something I’ve even had to consider to be an issue tbh
Whilt my comment was a bit tongue-in-cheek… What stretching? The article literally tells you to use other browsers. Browsers that take your data and track you.
Librewolf is definitely the best option for privacy imo even though I don’t use it. I tried to use librewolf but it gives me issue using odysee. Seems to be like a common issue and I’d rather just config Firefox than use YT
I believe very similar. I like that librefox is ‘out of the box’ secure(ish) and easy for everyone without dealing with Firefox templates. I generally trust privacytools.io and they have a note in regards to Firefox that says “Hardening & Tweaking: The default settings of Firefox are not the best choice to be a privacy respecting browser. Use Firefox Profilemaker to adjust the settings. An alternative is to download the hardened Arkenfox’s user.js - Place this in your Firefox’s user.js directory and it will fix everything for you. You can also do it manually.
Mozilla decided to include a unique download token in downloads from the Firefox website and uses telemetry to send the token and assign users with IDs. However, releases from the Mozilla FTP doesn’t include the token. If you don’t like any of this circus, choose LibreWolf instead.”
His political donations suggest a broader lack of moral values, which is borne out by the business model of his browser, which sought to steal ad space from websites and enable the broader economy of speculative tokens. Just suggests a lack of ethics all the way down
Changing links to add their affiliate codes was enough of a shady thing for me to swear off this browser. No telling what kind of a fast one the company will try to pull in the future.
Don’t use Tor in any browser except the Tor browser. Since the whole point of Tor is being totally anonymous with no way to identify you, if you’re able to be fingerprinted you’ve broken the whole thing and you shouldn’t even bother. And yes, you can be fingerprinted in Brave, with a high reliability. The best browser for resisting fingerprinting is the Tor browser, followed by LibreWolf.
Thanks. Whenever I raised the issue of homophobia or his general support of right-wing causes that threaten people’s privacy (see the aftermath of Roe v. Wade for example), I got downvoted, be it on the PrivacyGuides sub where they adore the browser, or right here just weeks ago.
Why was appointing Eich as CEO so controversial? It’s because he donated $1,000 in support of California’s Proposition 8 in 2008, which was a proposed amendment to California’s state constitution to ban same-sex marriage.
Besides this I cannot find another good reason not to use brave. Nobody point to a specific line of code that ruins privacy, not enough reasons.
I’ve been using brave for over a year. I can’t remember the last time I saw an ad on my screen. Now there might very well have been some But I have no memory of it.
I stopped using it because it was kinda shitty. Some page elements in my webapps just didn’t display or work correctly. Firefox is the more polished experience now. But it is kinda nice not having to morally justify your choice of browser, too.
They block the website’s own ads, but inject their own instead. So the user still gets ads, but the profits go to Brave. I know that if the site’s owner is aware of that and goes through the process of registering with Brave they get a share of the profits, but this should really be opt-in. As it is, the whole scheme is shady as fuck.
They do point out a couple of instances of questionable if not outright scummy things (e.g. the affiliate codes situation) but the article mostly gives off “stop using brave, I’ve decided it’s cancelled” vibes.
Not saying I like the ad model but how else are people to make money to keep software going. Not enough people donate which is why we have some much Ads currently.
They just started showing ads again on YouTube when watching on Brave. Which is a very good way to get me to permanently switch elsewhere! Thanks Brave!
I hadn’t read the details of their intended ad network. I just recall it sounded shady. Now that I read about it, it sounds very similar conceptually to Google’s Privacy Sandbox. I’m not sure if this is a better or worse approach than the status quo but I surely don’t trust Brave Inc, a startup with a questionable business model and investors, with gathering and processing this data.
How I love seeing people talk the big talk about ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ but also do their best to remind everyone that “your’e free as long as you agree with them”, else they attack with pitchforks and torches. Lovely. (Yes I’m talking to you).
I normally agree with xkcd, but this is a huge straw man.
It's not the government oppressing you, but you are being oppressed. It's not the government restricting your speech, but your speech is being restricted.
People complaining about their speech getting restricted aren't saying "...by the government" and it's a cop out to pretend that's what they're talking about in the first place. That's not the conversation when it comes to canceling and deplatforming. That's not what people are complaining about. When people say "the right to free speech" in this context, they aren't talking about a specific legal, constitutional doctrine. They're talking about the social contract. They're saying, "hey, we generally believe in freedom as a concept, why are other people shushing me for voicing my opinion?"
Note I'm not a "free speech absolutist", I don't think we should give everyone a megaphone and tell em to have fun. Sometimes canceling is the appropriate response. There's a lot of social media assholes out there stirring up shit and they should get muzzled.
But this particular argument is bullshit.
The argument we should be making is this: what you are saying is itself so heinous and dangerous that it is a violation of the social contract. The government is not silencing you, but we will.
And we should also keep in mind that just because the government isn't silencing someone, that doesn't mean it's perfectly fine that we do. Mob mentality is a thing and sometimes we (the mob) can go too far. We should be measured about canceling and deplatforming.
The only form of restriction/censoring of speech that has any bearing whatsoever on this discussion is that which is enacted by the government. Pretending that some other person is somehow “restricting their speech” and “oppressing them socially” (!?) by telling them to shut up or leave is disingenuous at best.
While we’re at it, “canceling” isn’t a thing. It’s a buzzword made up by the right to complain about the fact that they just got shown the door. Aww, boo hoo, did your feelings get hurt when you said your hot take & got told to fuck off? Maybe go reflect on that.
The argument we should be making is this: what you are saying is itself so heinous and dangerous that it is a violation of the social contract. The government is not silencing you, but we will.
Sorry, no. I’m under no obligation to listen to anyone, and I can walk away and/or kick them out of my space for any reason I choose. There’s no theoretical line their speech needs to cross before it’s somehow morally acceptable for me to tell someone to fuck off. I really couldn’t care less if you think I’m an asshole, so long as my conscience is clear.
I will not be “measured” about making a choice I think is the right thing to do, even if you disagree with it.
Literally every opinion I hold is morally right, and I have the right to gather other like minded people and oppress anyone who says otherwise. I am never wrong.
ASK_ME_ABOUT_LOOM, 2023
[transcribed from lip reading via telescope, as he was too high on his horse for the rest of us to hear]
How is refusing to use a product that no one is obligated to use anti-Freedum? Sometimes I wonder what people think freedom even is. In a free country you are free to vote with your dollars, it is absolutely free and democratic to boycott products that do things you don’t like. Did you even read the article or just rage after you realized one of the reasons people want you to stop using this browser is because the CEO is a bigot? Why people twist logic into knots trying to defend hateful people is beyond me.
There is no rage in my comment. I get a lot of rage coming from you’re direction and that’s why I won’t dignify your paragraph of nonsense any lmore than telling you to try to understand what I said. also you are only proving me right but acting this way. You rage at me because you think I might have a different opinion and god forbid if someone thinks differently 😆
The fact that you think I would favor a silly phrase like that is laughable. I still wouldn’t use brave because of the crypto crap, I couldn’t care less about who is woke and who is asleep since I have no problem with the lgbt community and in fact I have friends irl who belong to it. No It is the blatant fascism that I have a problem with. You can choose to use whatever software you want and again I couldn’t care less, but hating someone and sanctioning them and their product because they allegedly donated to something against what you like or think is right, is stupid. If you have the right to choose a certain thing, others must also have the choice to choose the opposite. That is freedom. Expecting ( forcing ) everyone to conform to your world views and standards is literally fascism.
I need you take a step back and realize that you think people not sanctioning a product because they don’t like the moral code of the owners is “stupid”.
You won’t sanction their product over their decision to bind crypto to the browser.
I won’t sanction their product because I find their morals to be lacking.
Neither of us are wrong, but one of use is inflammatory.
I use a derivative of this browser for what I call “junk surfing” and I find it personally satisfying to feed it garbage searches, just for the fun of collecting an obscure crypto I know will never accrue any true value.
But if they are willing to give it to me, I’ll take it.
The important searches go through FF or the DuckDuckGo browser.
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