this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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Privacy Guides

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

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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."

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[–] harry_assman@lemmy.world 113 points 1 year ago (3 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 84 points 1 year ago (6 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 44 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] azron@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Librewolf is starting to replace Firefox for me. Either way birds of a feather!

[–] Jarmer@kbin.social 9 points 1 year ago

I think LW is better out of the box. It has both UBO and Containers built in. Which is just awesome. I still use FF as my daily just because I have customized it beyond belief, but if I were to start over again I think I'd start with LW.

[–] frequency@lemmy.world 31 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] CrypticCoffee@lemm.ee 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Agreed, a lot of Reddit comments felt very shilly. Firefox is king and helps prevent Google dictate web standards.

Yeah, exactly. If every browser is chromium based the web will be an unhealthy monoculture. Easy for a single player to dictate standards. Haven't seen this mentioned as much, but its really important

[–] Matt@lemmy.one 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Brave is great for less techy people because it's defaults are good enough. It's not necessary to tweak settings and install add-ons to get basic privacy. I definitely prefer Firefox, but it takes some knowledge to get it to surpass Brave's defaults.

[–] TheButtonJustSpins@infosec.pub 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't like installing add-ons. I'd rather have it baked into the browser.

[–] RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Add-ons give you a lot more choice and control than baked in options.

What's stopping Brave's blocker from just allowing ads from Brave's services? Can you see under the hood to tell if it's blocking everything or just surface level stuff?

A proprietary built in blocker is only as trustworthy as the people that made it, and as the links in this discussion suggest, Brave isn't earning much trust.

[–] Monologue@lemmy.zip 16 points 1 year ago

you are right about choice and more control but brave's ad blocker is not proprietary here is the github link, ublock origin is still the king though

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[–] Syakaizin@lemmy.fmhy.ml 6 points 1 year ago

For me, Firefox is an inferior product in terms of security feature implementation

https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.html

[–] HughJanus@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

Stock Firefox has very limited privacy protections.

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[–] BeeCoffee@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 1 year ago

Everything is a process and personally thats no excuse to not criticize the bad actions of a project like brave, but in the topic of personal opinions like those from Brandon Eich’s, i think is completely emotional the reactions of the brave users, he has awful opinions with the same sex mariage thing and covid but that does not mean the damn product/service he's part of is bad or have censorship. He better shut up and dont ruin a good project because he wants to "speak up" about his stupid rant about insane opinions that makes bad PR.

[–] Acetanilide@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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

[–] harry_assman@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

You can try Librewolf. It is a firefox fork with focus on privacy. You do not need to go through many settings when setting it up, as you need to do with firefox standalone.

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[–] Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 35 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.

[–] DeadGemini@waveform.social 31 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 8 points 1 year ago (3 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 5 points 1 year ago (4 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

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[–] federal_explorer@discuss.tchncs.de 28 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 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 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.)

[–] federal_explorer@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 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 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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

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[–] sangle_of_flame@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

you know that this "I don't care that this person holds bigoted beliefs and thinks that some people shouldn't have rights, they make the good computer program so who cares" attitude is why so many people think that tech guys are reactionary, right?

[–] federal_explorer@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well I am already used to using software from people who I don't agree with in politics.

We are using one right now, Lemmy's devs are AFAIK tankies, and that doesn't really matter.

Also not all people share your political opinions.

[–] sangle_of_flame@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Also not all people share your political opinions.

how are you going to call "this group shouldn't have the rights that everyone else has" something as quaint as a "political opinion"

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[–] echo@sopuli.xyz 15 points 1 year ago

the shady world of brave

[–] nostalgicgamerz@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Whelp that’s it I’m going to Firefox. That’s all I needed to see

Edit: annnd uninstalled. That’s all she wrote

[–] guckfoogle@sh.itjust.works 13 points 1 year ago

Lol isn't that what all these ai chatbots are doing?

[–] Poob@lemmy.ca 11 points 1 year ago (4 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.

[–] UlrikHD@programming.dev 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What issues are you encountering on android Firefox? I've used Firefox + ublock for years and I don't think I have ever encountered an issue that was fixed by using chrome instead.

[–] LinkOpensChest_wav@lemmy.one 13 points 1 year ago

I've never had any big problems with Firefox Android either. I do prefer the Fennec branch though, since it's on F-Droid and has about:config

[–] steal_your_face@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 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 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

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[–] zingo@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 year ago
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[–] ImmaculateTaint@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Is this only referring to the Brave search engine?

[–] CrypticCoffee@lemm.ee 5 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 8 points 1 year ago (8 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 6 points 1 year ago

What makes you say DDG does not care about privacy?

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[–] leraje@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago
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[–] jacktherippah@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Does anyone have another Chromium browser recommendation for Android?

[–] sounddrill@lemmy.antemeridiem.xyz 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

Ublock origin on the go

[–] jacktherippah@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)
  • 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.

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[–] RustyOperator@sopuli.xyz 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'd like to shout out Mull (Firefox based) and Mulch (Chrome based) web browsers. They are basically more secure and private versions of those app and they maintained by the devs of DivestOS which is the privacy Android OS that is recommended for devices that aren't Pixels.

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[–] JshKlsn@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

I've been telling people for over a year to not use brave after they did that crypto referral injection thing lol

[–] Fizz@lemmy.nz 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is that shady? Arent all other AI companies + many other data gather services doing exactly the same thing. We need to wait for the court cases to conclude if AI datasets can use publicly available information for training.

[–] leraje@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

Just because multiple companies are doing it doesn't make it less shady. They're literally selling you 'rights' to content that isn't theirs to sell.

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