This still doesn’t make brave a good privacy browser in the long run
The founder of Brave browser got fired from Firefox because he was homophobic
I used some stuff to block my location and windows recall BECAUSE FUCK YOU MICROSOFT!
You can’t block all of Windows spyware. The best case of action would be to install an alternative operating system like Linux or a BSD-derivative. It’s counter-intuitive to “fuck Microsoft” when you are still using their OS.
I wonder why the fuck is am taking so long to do it…
I recently switched, and would be happy to give whatever rudimentary pointers I can. I’ve found that Linux mint is the best option for me. You can also easily flash it onto a USB and try it out to confirm compatibility.
The biggest things are these:
- you have to make sure to backup anything you want, because the installation wipes the hard drive.
- you must (usually) completely erase the windows partition, since the windows updater will usually bork the Linux install the moment you try to boot windows.
- you should turn off SecureBoot and bitlocker before you attempt an installation.
- rather than dual-booting windows with Linux, it is comparatively simple to set up a Virtual Machine running windows inside Linux.
- if you’re getting really serious about privacy, you’re going to have a TON of services that you may be unable to access, because they are full of trackers and spyware. Baby steps are recommended before trying to make a clean break from all telemetry, tracking and spyware.if you use an android, try installing TrackerControl from f-droid (or, for one that doesn’t break as much stuff, Duckduckgo’s app tracking protection) and enable it. You’ll begin to see just how many calls to add, data brokers, telemetry, and other shit gets caught, and DDG doesn’t even touch all the google spyware.
I gave been wanting to go on linux mint for almost a year. Its time I fucking did it.
Edit: I have been doing a lot for privacy, but it just isn’t enough. For example I wanted to use venice.ai… but I didn’t just use a tutamail email, I even used a prepaid credit card. I live in canada where you don’t need to attach your name to a prepaid card, meaning it is as anonymous as possible if you want to buy something with a card (and yes, I paid for it in cash and it was activated by the store).
Well, let me know if you’ve got any trouble. Oh, and do you have an HP? Those things SUCK at installing Linux. One of those things you have to find out from trying to install it on three separate HP devices.
I am a Dell guy through and through. I flashed linux mint on a cheap ass USB I had lying around. I will start with my laptop this weekend.
Nice
there are 100% fed backdoors for looking in your pc in Windows
anarcho-…braveism ???
Literally nothing will get me to use this crypto scam of a browser.
I’ve used this for years and have never interacted with any crypto feature
That you know of
That sounds like fear mongering, but ok.
Brave was found to inject crypto referral links into your
clicksurl auto complete.https://www.tomsguide.com/news/brave-affiliate-links-autocomplete
They kind of just ignore that the crypto feature is opt-in.
Not interacted doesnt mean it’s non-existant.
It exists and therefore it’s bad enough.Existent**
It’s fine as a browser and it does a good job at syncing across devices. Still my chrome based browser of choice.
How mich actual difference (minus the crypto) is there to base-chromium?
Afaik chromium is capable pf being a browser. Does that also have syncing or is it not capable of that?Honestly not sure. I haven’t done a side by side with plain old chromium in years.
On iOS it’s one of very few browsers that has good adblocking built in
it’s bad enough.
This is debatable. i find some that people hate on AI and crypto regardless of it’s implementation
I’m as crypto bro as they come. Fuck Brave, BAT is a pay-to-surf scam.
Running Linux would block this feature too.
Just reason sayin.
Running Linux would block this feature too.
Keep In mind that you can still be captured by this feature indirectly,
Discord for example certainly doesn’t intend to do anything to hide your messages, they recently went public so in their eyes more tracking the better.Discord… Still isn’t public?
They’re certainly talking about it but they haven’t announced a date yet.
Having said that, element and matrix are both more privacy respecting so I do agree with the recommendation in general.
Discord… Still isn’t public?
They’re certainly talking about it but they haven’t announced a date yet.
Apologies, I striked the lines out of my previous comment. It simply was an example of how you still can be captured.
There’s one in every thread.
There are dozens of us! Dozens!
Thats 96% of lemmy users
One?
Actually, Linux doesn’t block windows, it just isn’t windows.
Just reason saying.
Actually it does! When youre installing, just delete the windows boot partition and your done!
Heck, wipe the entire disk!
(based on a real life experience)
(windows just kept standing no matter what partition i deleted so i wiped the disk clean)
Delete only the boot partition? Doug kick him off the tour!
I only use Linux and I want Windows to just stay out of my way or it’ll pay, listen to what I say.
You gotta have your old files! But man does NTFS suck ass
I recently decided to switch from using Atomic Fedora to reg KDE Fedora (cause tinkering and bypassing atomic features got on my nerves), and I almost went through with wiping everything and only having Linux installed. And then I realized I probably wouldn’t be able to do some tests for college cause they use anti-cheating software (lockdown browser) which they probably wouldn’t like if I ran it in a VM or wine…
But man, once I’m out of college, I’m probably wiping Windows for good! Also gonna factory reset that partition so it at least takes way less space on my drive.
(Side note: the other hesitation is that I’m 90% kernel updates nuked Bluetooth for me around March (It worked when I rolled back to January/February releases) and I do have zoom classes sometimes. Like, do I just have to buy a Bluetooth dongle to deal with this?)
Tbf, anything that isn’t AI Windows blocks the feature. Including regular Windows.
People just need to not fall for the scam edition and they don’t have to deal with this shit.
Brave’s CEO is a homophobic Trump supporter. No thanks.
That’s not even the worst thing about him. He also invented JavaScript.
He invented JavaScript, so definitely don’t use that either. For real. JavaScript sucks.
I used to hate JS but barley had used it. Now I use it on a daily base and hate it even more.
JS is difficult to avoid. Brave is easy to avoid, just use another browser.
Does he run/have power over JavaScript right now?
No, not directly. Not any more than your average tech leader who goes to conferences and discusses it.
Oh wait hey you’re on my instance. Cool! We’re such small one lol
“It’s a small club and you
ain’tin it”—Warren Bullgates Lincolnham
😁 It’s an elite club.
Ah, you beat me to it.
He could be next husband of Ivanka Trump - I don’t care
If he provide good service for me - browser which fits my needs. I would even send him money every day
“I’ll support fascism as long as it’s convenient for me”
No. “I will support a good service and not mingle with politics”
If fascism was a passive philosophy that didn’t hurt anyone then you might have a point. But as you can see recently it’s extremely dangerous and ruins lives.
You may not want to mingle with politics, but it doesn’t have the same view.
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
Plato, The Republic bk. 1, 347c
Yep, everything is politics whether we like it or not.
What does that have to do with the browser? Last I checked, browsers aren’t transphobic.
You do you, but I personally refuse to make product choices based on the person who makes it. Brave is the least bad chromium browser, so I use it as a backup to my main Gecko-based browser. I’m not a fan of Mozilla either, but that’s irrelevant since I pick my software based on what it does, not based on the management of the company that builds it.
Brave is the least bad chromium browser
It’s pretty sleazy. Ungoogled Chromium or Vivaldi are probably less sleazy, if at all.
Vivaldi is not open source, so for me it doesn’t count as a valid option.
I‘m not even pro Brave but all that ad stuff is opt-in so it doesn‘t matter as long as you don‘t want to see ads. The arguments in this thread are starting to just loop in circles. Essentially using Brave is fine if you stick to the default. There‘s no sleazy stuff if you don‘t enable it and the CEO also doesn‘t make a dime from you if that‘s something you‘re concerned about. You could of course use a different chromium browser if you want but it‘s virtually the same thing.
The only two there that bother me are the affiliate code thing (reminds me of the Honey drama) and installing extra software without consent. The first was a bad call and probably related with how their ad replacement stuff works (if anything, they should merely axe affiliate links; Firefox has that as an option), and this"solution" to the latter is pretty odd to me:
reinstall the browser without admin rights
Why would a browser need admin rights in the first place? I haven’t used Windows in well over a decade, so I don’t think that particular one would be an issue for me.
The rest can be grouped as:
- bugs - bug fixes generally don’t get prioritized until enough users complain; I would be very picky if I was an at risk person (activist or whatever) and would probably only use Tor browser
- opt-in services
- their marketing department
My options for chromium browsers are:
- something with ineffective ad blocking
- Opera - I used it before it became a chromium browser, then it went downhill; not FOSS
- Brave, with all its warts
Since ad blocking and FOSS are my prerequisites, Brave basically wins by default.
Just block with unlock 🙉 why choose browser based on a ad block feature that is worse (injecting own ads/adware and therefore trying to dictate who is allowed to grab your attention) than the ad blocking extension?
I recommend Firefox, due to best compatibility with uBlock (fuck manifest v3) and additionally have a DNS filter in your network, like pihole or adguard.
On the go, use wireguard VPN to always be digitally home, and get your ads blocked (as well as tracking organisations) like that.
I recommend Firefox
So do I, that’s my main. Brave is my backup for the handful of sites that don’t like Firefox.
I would not choose to use a product made by people I disagree with but leaving that aside:
Is it the least bad? Why not degoogled chrome? Or chromium? Even vivaldi seems like a better choice.
Ad blocking mostly. That’s literally all I need in a chromium browser, because I only use it on a handful of sites that don’t work properly in Firefox.
Chromium is also okay, but no ad blocker. I have that installed as well in the really unlikely case that the ad blocker gets in the way.
99% of my browsing is on a Firefox browser, and 99% of the rest is on Brave. I use it so infrequently the “time saved” metric is a merely seconds.
Actually, I consider Brave the best (or the least bed…) browser on the market. Period. The fact that it isn’t made by Mozilla is a plus for me.
I don’t like Mozilla either, but here are my priorities in a web browser:
- FOSS
- Privacy tools - includes ad blocking; I’d actually be okay with ads if they didn’t track me
- Promotes open web standards - rendering engine diversity is critical here, I don’t want a repeat of the IE era
- Security
- Performance
Firefox ticks all of them, and my issues with Mozilla as an org don’t really come into play. I use a fork on my phone, but I use Firefox on my laptop and desktop because I trust the binaries coming from my Linux distribution maintainers (part of 4).
Good for you. I actively refuse to use it or any of its derivatives to avoid endorsing Mozilla by giving them market share. Additionally, I find that Brave just performs better (and needs one extension less to be functional).
I care a lot about rendering engine diversity, and Firefox is the largest non-chromium browser, so I use it. It’s fast enough for me, and my handful of extensions gives me what I need.
Again, good for you.
Brave 🤮
Windows 🤮
“feature” 🤮
Truffle Shuffle 🤮
Kirby vacuuming blended spinach 🤮
Wait, what?
Unfortunately that would involve using the Brave browser, which is an antifeature in itself.
Can you elaborate? I don’t use it.
The better option would be to not use spyware as an operating system.
Do you consider any form of telemetry “spyware”?
I don’t think taking screenshots of everything you do every few seconds is telemetry.
It’s not, but it’s also not spyware - it’s local, encrypted, AND optional.
Microsoft is known for making things “optional” at first then eventually forcing it down everyone’s throats. Removing offline accounts is one of them.
It’s not so much the technology itself is malware, but its behavior replicates that of malware.
Yes hello John Windows my microwave account name is Oobe\bypassnro
This also works: shift-F10 before you get to the network configuration, then type this and press enter start ms-cxh:localonly
For either method, if you configure networking during setup, e.g. plug in an ethernet cable or give it the wi-fi password, it’ll keep returning to the online account screen. You need to do it prior to network config.
Right. So you’re all panicking just in case.
That’s what’s being swept under the rug as “alarmists being loud”.
The same way you have a lock on your front door “just in case”. It’s not emotional. It’s logical.
The lock is there. The whole thing is encrypted.
If they somehow go through encryption, they won’t just have the EU on their arses, governments of the entire world will be after them, because they trust that this encryption system makes their data secure.
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Optional like how it reminds me every 3 days that it wants my info for “customization” purposes, and I can only sleep the notification for another 3 days instead of telling it to fuck off?
They have been so predatory, at this point no one should see anything they do as benefiting end users.
If it does that, outrage will be understandable.
Getting outraged about something they said will be 100% optional and hasn’t even released yet is just childish.
Actual optional things are disabled by default.
So you’re saying you haven’t bothered to read about Recall at all, you just assumed it’s going to be enabled by default?
Until a windows update kicks in and somehow turns it on for the world. thanks but no thanks. I’ll be disabling this not with a reg key but with local policy or DSC if I have to use a windows machine for personal again.
I switched to Linux 2 months ago.
Until a windows update kicks in and somehow turns it on for the world.
I don’t know if this is a regional thing, but I’ve been using Windows since 3.11 and have NEVER had ONE instance of an update randomly turning on something that I’ve turned off before.
Look at this bootlicker ignoring history and saying trust Microsoft.
“Look at this fossil thinking it’s still 1990”, I guess?
Mate, did you miss how 30 years have passed? How the world change? Can you even begin to imagine the fine the EU would slap without a second thought on MS if they tried pulling something like suddenly grabbing these screenshots from users’ devices?
You consider actual, literal spyware as being merely telemetry?
What are you talking about now?
I believe they are talking about Windows, an OS that is spyware and no one should use
An example of Windows being spyware not standard telemetry is the Recall feature. A feature that doesn’t just tell you how the OS is used but actually takes screenshots every few seconds
Windows, an OS that is spyware and no one should use
Of, ffs, grow up.
An example of Windows being spyware not standard telemetry is the Recall feature. A feature that doesn’t just tell you how the OS is used but actually takes screenshots every few seconds
You have no clue what you’re talking about, do you?
Recall only works on devices with an NPU. Do you know why? Because it runs locally. It’s got NOTHING to do with telemetry, because it does NOT send data to Microsoft.
Recall only works on devices with an NPU. Do you know why? Because it runs locally.
Show code or gtfo
LOL, this is hilarious :D
Imagine believing they can sneak gigabytes of network traffic without anyone noticing just because you can’t read the code! :D
Honestly it largely is.
Personally I like sharing crash reports, but even then, the user should be able to turn that off if you like.
Telemetry should be 100% opt-in.
Honestly it largely is.
I mean, by definition, it isn’t.
It’s anonymous and not malicious in nature. It’s a diagnostic and engagement measuring tool.
not malicious in nature
Haha, sure thing William
Are you a tech-illiterate person?
If not, explain how is it malicious.
diagnostic
I think it is useful to send crash reports, but the user should have power over it (see: when macOS generates a crash report, it asks the user if they would like to send it)
engagement measuring
That is your data they are taking to make money off of without your consent, and I consider that malicious. There are ways to do that with consent. See: Steam’s annual hardware survey
That is your data they are taking to make money off of without your consent
I mean… They’re a for-profit company, so literally anything they do is to make money.
But it’s not “my data”, it’s anonymous. The “engagement” info is in relation to features. That’s why some features are removed - because nobody uses them. Or rather: not enough people use them to warrant maintenance.
And how do you know it’s not malicious in nature? I’d like to know what your definition of “malicious” is if you’re just fine with letting a Corpo run system look at everything you’re doing.
And how do you know it’s not malicious in nature?
Because I have a functioning brain.
I’d like to know what your definition of “malicious” is
Malware is designed to hurt you by extracting your personal information or resources.
Telemetry is designed to give developers feedback about product/functionality usage and is anonymous.
you’re just fine with letting a Corpo run system look at everything you’re doing.
I’m not, and it’s not. Unlike you, I actually checked what data telemetry gathers and I’m perfectly fine with it. It’s inconsequential and anonymous.
how the hell do you not?
I don’t know, maybe because I understand the definition of “spyware” and “telemetry”?
Well, semantically yes, not all telemetry is spyware. However regarding Windows telemetry it’s indistinguishable from spyware - you have no idea nor control over the data gathered, measured and processed.
The crux is that Windows telemetry is opt out, opting out can’t be done during installation, and historically opting out wasn’t sticky. Additionally some Windows telemetry is still being sent despite opting out.
That makes Windows telemetry fulfill all spyware criteria.
However regarding Windows telemetry it’s indistinguishable from spyware - you have no idea nor control over the data gathered, measured and processed
Ah, so you’re another one of those fear-mongers?
Here’s the Required Diagnostic Events Fields (required telemetry) documentation.
Keeping in mind that it’s anonymous - which parts of this are you so vehemently against sending to Microsoft?
That makes Windows telemetry fulfill all spyware criteria.
The shittiest spyware in history, I guess, considering it’s all anonymous…
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Brave browser blocks Windows feature that takes screenshots of everything you do on your PC
As does Linux.
You use Linux? Here take this you’ve earned it 🍪
What if they always decline cookies? Or is this cookie one of those necessary ones?
Someone who used Linux would know that
OK, you need to explain to me how tf does Linux block something that works only on Windows.
No Windows, no such Windows “features”.
Well, you certainly need to be in a specific state of mind for this to make any sense…
I’ve been dosing too much tux, doc. My mind’s all FOSSY.
Yep, and you also have to be in a specific state of mind to be okay with “features” like something that takes screenshots of everything you do on your PC.
Then don’t enable it.
But, you can’t disable Recall, that’s the point…
You can just not use Windows and use Linux instead.
But, you can’t disable Recall, that’s the point…
Well… Technically you’re correct - because the feature is not out yet.
No idea WTF you people are reading here, but for a “Technology” community, the comments here are just plain ridiculous…
They haven’t blocked the windows feature, they’re using DRM to interfere with it. Microsoft could easily change how the DRM works any time they want, rendering all these hacks useless.
Exactly, how do you even fight with the OS except just making it bit hard for them lol. You have to tell the OS what pixels to put in the screen, there’s literally no way you can hide things from the OS if they want to know.
People, ynless they are at work, can choose to use Linux any time. I will personally assist if needed.
They could, but Disney…
then people can complained it on Brave Github or their official forum and it will be fixed by their team
My point was that brave’s solution, like Signal’s, is dependent on microsoft playing fair. If microsoft decides they don’t want brave, signal, or anyone else using DRM to interfere with their screen scraping chatbot, there is not going to be an easy way to fix it.
No way they’d do that though, because then they’d have the mouse and the other members of the content mafia breathing down their necks.
It’s an image every few seconds. Not that piracy is currently even interested in tech that reencodes the content.
And for training, copyrighted stuff is already everywhere; AI tools seem to be limited on the output side rather than raw training data.Sure it wouldnt be rational to care about DRM being broken a small amount allowing limited amount of copyright material to be copied.
What do you think their response would be?
yeah, no, i’m not using your shitty browser.
Linux blocks that “feature” too…
What feature? Recall?? That’s Windows 11-specific and hasn’t even launched yet??
The joke is that Linux blocks this by not doing it at all. Which is why people should switch to Linux. Which is a good idea. But that’s up to the people.
I love this comment so much
Let me know when it is discovered that they in fact replaced MS Recall with their own version that was scraping your data in yet another sketchy attempt to make money.
