this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
11 points (100.0% liked)

Privacy Guides

16790 readers
12 users here now

In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. We’re here to help.

This is a community for sharing news about privacy, posting information about cool privacy tools and services, and getting advice about your privacy journey.


You can subscribe to this community from any Kbin or Lemmy instance:

Learn more...


Check out our website at privacyguides.org before asking your questions here. We've tried answering the common questions and recommendations there!

Want to get involved? The website is open-source on GitHub, and your help would be appreciated!


This community is the "official" Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, which can be verified here. Other "Privacy Guides" communities on other Lemmy servers are not moderated by this team or associated with the website.


Moderation Rules:

  1. We prefer posting about open-source software whenever possible.
  2. This is not the place for self-promotion if you are not listed on privacyguides.org. If you want to be listed, make a suggestion on our forum first.
  3. No soliciting engagement: Don't ask for upvotes, follows, etc.
  4. Surveys, Fundraising, and Petitions must be pre-approved by the mod team.
  5. Be civil, no violence, hate speech. Assume people here are posting in good faith.
  6. Don't repost topics which have already been covered here.
  7. News posts must be related to privacy and security, and your post title must match the article headline exactly. Do not editorialize titles, you can post your opinions in the post body or a comment.
  8. Memes/images/video posts that could be summarized as text explanations should not be posted. Infographics and conference talks from reputable sources are acceptable.
  9. No help vampires: This is not a tech support subreddit, don't abuse our community's willingness to help. Questions related to privacy, security or privacy/security related software and their configurations are acceptable.
  10. No misinformation: Extraordinary claims must be matched with evidence.
  11. Do not post about VPNs or cryptocurrencies which are not listed on privacyguides.org. See Rule 2 for info on adding new recommendations to the website.
  12. General guides or software lists are not permitted. Original sources and research about specific topics are allowed as long as they are high quality and factual. We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.

Additional Resources:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

From the article:

"I know for a fact that Wikipedia operates under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license, which explicitly states that if you're going to use the data, you must give attribution. As far as search engines go, they can get away with it because linking back to a Wikipedia article on the same page as the search results is considered attribution.

But in the case of Brave, not only are they disregarding the license - they're also charging money for the data and then giving third parties "rights" to that data."

top 34 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] harry_assman@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

TIL; stay away from Brave.

Not only because of this article, but merely an hour ago I have read also this post (numerous links provided in the post) about the dubious Brendan Eich.

[–] Monologue@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

i don't get why people choose to use brave, firefox is great and if you really need that chromium base ungoogled chromium exists

[–] SmugBedBug@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

Firefox has always been my go-to. In my opinion more people should use it.

[–] dngray@lemmy.one 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

ungoogled chromium exists

The reason is they have proper build infrastructure managed by the Brave. With Ungoogled Chromium the binaries are produced by third parties, vary in version etc. People claim they would only use "open source software" but they do download binary versions nevertheless and don't compile that code themselves. This increases the risk of a supply chain attack, where a malicious binary is submitted and nobody has really knows until it is too late. The other issue is they disable CRLSets because of "google hate" which we think actually increases the likelihood of a MiTM attack occurring because rogue certificates are not detected and invalidated as quickly as they could have been.

This article describes a few other things https://qua3k.github.io/ungoogled/

[–] frequency@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I think Brave did some aggressive marketing, including social media posts and comments. I did buy their narrative at first too - a browser that already tuned to block ads and trackers. But later I've noticed that it constantly connects back to brave server and it looked suspicious. Firefox is the best.

[–] Acetanilide@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well fuck. Thank you. Guess i need to change browsers. Any recs or is firefox best?

[–] goji@lemmy.ca 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ungoogled Chromium is my current favourite

Previously was using Firefox Developer’s edition which is also decent. But I like a minimalist browser that acts more like a framework to which I can just add what I want, and doesn’t come with a lot of bullshit I don’t need.

[–] dngray@lemmy.one 1 points 1 year ago

Ungoogled Chromium is my current favourite

The reason we don't recommend Ungoogled Chromium and instead recommend Brave on the privacyguides.org website is because they have proper build infrastructure managed by the Brave. With Ungoogled Chromium the binaries are produced by third parties, vary in version etc. People claim they would only use "open source software" but they do download binary versions nevertheless and don't compile that code themselves. This increases the risk of a supply chain attack, where a malicious binary is submitted and nobody has really knows until it is too late. The other issue is they disable CRLSets because of "google hate" which we think actually increases the likelihood of a MiTM attack occurring because rogue certificates are not detected and invalidated as quickly as they could have been.

This article describes a few other things https://qua3k.github.io/ungoogled/

[–] MarioBarisa@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

Yet another reason to not use Brave

[–] DeadGemini@waveform.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

tsk tsk tsk. When will people learn to just use Firefox or Librewolf? Do you want a web browser, or an AI training crypto wallet?

[–] zingo@lemmy.ca 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I read ya.

I was always skeptical about Brave with their side projects of crypto etc. Its funny because privacytools.io recommends them till this day.

I have been using Librewolf for some time now and I am happy with it.

[–] ward2k@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

privacytools.io is no longer the recommended one since the mod/domain owner split a long while ago, it now heavily endorses ads (such as nordvpn) you instead should use

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/tools/

Brave still is a great browser just disable a few settings as recommended in the guide

[–] bear@slrpnk.net 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Brave still is a great browser just disable a few settings as recommended in the guide

Brave is still Chromium in a new coat of paint and you're still aiding Google in their domination of web standards.

[–] dngray@lemmy.one 1 points 1 year ago

Brave is still Chromium in a new coat of paint and you’re still aiding Google in their domination of web standards.

That is a little unfair tbh, they do quite a lot, such as their privacy shields, including the script blocking one which is basically like NoScript.

They also do some work on anti fingerprinting tech and other things along that vein.

[–] ticklemyIP@lemmy.one 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Privacy Guides recommends them also.

[–] dngray@lemmy.one 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Except we're transparent as to why and Burung Hantu (Marco Wollank) (current owner of PTIO) is not.

[–] federal_explorer@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This not exclusive to brave, AI copyright is still not clear. Bing and others like Bard are doing the same.

[–] leraje@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Yeah and I expect it from those companies. I guess I was naive enough to think Brave would be better than this.

But then I didn't know about Eich's homophobia, antivaxx beliefs and basic awfulness either (as mentioned in the link u/Xaeris mentions.)

[–] fishos@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You linked to the Alexandrite app, not lemmy itself.

[–] leraje@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

Whoops - sorry, fixed it now.

[–] federal_explorer@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Honestly I don't care about his political beliefs, and Brave search is the only competitve independent search engine out there, it's genuinely a joy to use. Until AI crawling gets banned they aren't doing anything wrong.

Brave continues to be the best mainstream private browser, backed by actions instead of empty words like Firefox.

[–] leraje@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

You don't think there's anything wrong with selling you the 'rights' to other people's content?

[–] echo@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago

the shady world of brave

[–] Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

I liked Brave for a while. But slowly things just started to feel sketchy to me. Their weird insistence on putting their crypto bullshit and wallet services in your face. I just felt like, "I want a browser. Can't you just be a fucking browser?" At a certain point adding all these other 'services' they just end up just a weird-ass money making scheme, like they're two steps away from using my computer for crypto mining.

[–] jacktherippah@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Does anyone have another Chromium browser recommendation for Android?

[–] sounddrill@lemmy.antemeridiem.xyz 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Idk why you want to go with chromium based, firefox got mobile extensions!

Ublock origin on the go

[–] jacktherippah@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)
  • On Android, Firefox lacks per-site process isolation, which makes it less secure than Chromium browsers (not insecure, just less secure.)
  • With privacy.resistFingerprinting on, Firefox on Android is stuck at 60hz, which I don't like.
  • There is a noticeable difference in performance between Firefox and Chromium. Firefox is consistently slower when loading webpages, which you notice after using Chromium.

Don't get me wrong, I like Firefox. I use LibreWolf on desktop. I just can't justify using it on Android, at least not yet. Guess I'll go back to using Vanadium.

[–] ImmaculateTaint@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is this only referring to the Brave search engine?

[–] CrypticCoffee@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But it is designed by their company. Their products represent their leadership.

Firefox and DDG for me.

[–] utopianrevolt@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I honestly just started cracking up after seeing DDG mentioned after those initial 2 sentences.

DuckDuckGo does not care about your privacy. Switch to SearX, StartPage, or Kagi.

[–] glacier@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 year ago

What makes you say DDG does not care about privacy?

[–] Poob@lemmy.ca 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well fuck, what am I supposed to use? I use bitwarden for passwords, so that shit works everywhere, but I want a mobile browser and a desktop browser that share history. Being able to share tabs between devices is a nice bonus.

Firefox on mobile is hot garbage with infuriating UI bugs. I keep trying to switch to it, and keep switching away after a few days.

I'm sure as shit not going to Chrome.

[–] steal_your_face@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I use Firefox on iOS and grapheneOS and it works fine. UI is not as nice as others but it works. Never seen bugs personally ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[–] cultsuperstar@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Isn't Firefox on iOS essentially a skinned Safari? Unless Apple has changed their stance, I thought all browsers had to use webkit?

load more comments
view more: next ›