I don’t trust Brave one bit. Its whole approach reeks of a bait-and-switch (think “we won’t share or sell your data” pre-9/11 Google). Its founder is a massive homophobe and crypto-bro, and I have a massive learned distrust of homophobes and crypto-bros.
Moreover, I see no reason to use it when we already have far superior options (Firefox).
I don’t generally use that feature, even as a programmer, but I use Google at work just because my privacy is already pretty exposed at work and I’m not looking up anything wild on a corporate network. I also enjoy the targeting in this particular instance because then my search results are developer focused
You should also check out Tab for a Cause as well! A new tab screen that uses ad revenue to donate to charities. You can select your cause and every new tab you open contributes to it
I can get you a referral link the next time I’m on my desktop, it you’d like
I appreciate the sentiment and the offer, but I know that Tab for a Cause does not support Firefox, and I exclusively use Firefox browsers.
However, I do donate directly to several non-profits, and I work for a charitable non-profit myself, so I’ll actually mention this to my admins because I don’t think we’re part of this yet! So thanks!
Thank you for pointing that fact out! It sounds like it was decided by Mozilla about a year ago to institute that change and I hadn’t noticed the lack of ads until today. At one point it did have issues, but I was able to get around that by changing some settings. But from the sounds of it that may no longer be possible
I just tried it, and my one concern is that it appears to tailor its results based on locational data, which is a feature I try to avoid. Like you said, I might use it sometimes, but I’m sticking with Startpage and SearXNG instances as my primary search engines for now. I’m adding it to my list though, so I can test it out a bit more. Maybe there’s a setting I haven’t found yet.
I went to the open streetwise magazine and asked folks if any search engines use open streetmaps by default with searches and they steered me to quant. to boot it otherwise behaves just like duck duck go but does not have the microsoft baggage.
Unfortunately, my experience with qwant does not corroborate this. In spite of promoting themselves as “the search engine that doesn’t know anything about you,” in reality the use locational data derived from your IP to provide tailored search results. This function is not opt-in, and in fact there is apparently no way to opt out.
I don’t think I need to explain why this is deeply problematic in a privacy community, but just in case: Imagine that people in my location tend to have right-wing extremist interests. A search engine could then decide that people in my area are interested in right-wing conspiracies and thus serve me more of this type of result. (This has in fact been the case for me upon first testing a site or app when all it has is my general locational data to serve me algorithmic recommendations, so this is a concrete problem for me.)
On top of this, a search engine that brazenly declares to know nothing about me is in fact using data derived from me to customize results? They have breached my trust from the start.
A search engine should use only search terms, syntax, and data I manually and knowingly provide to produce results. No more than this.
The way I test this is quite simple: Try searching “restaurants in my area.” When I do so, it currently provides a list of restaurants in Helsinki, since that is where I’m currently connecting via VPN. When I disconnect my VPN and try again, it gives results for my home town. Any search engine that does this is not one I opt to use.
Gonna give SearXNG a spin then, since even though “I don’t have anything to hide talk”, privacy is a right we’re better off upholding and I want to use services that respect it.
Does any search engine work well for super specific stuff these days? I’m finding search is increasingly useless for my niches (high level topics usually being Carpentry, Building Codes, and Astronomy) but their results usually take me to a word vomit blog, something clearly GPT generated or Pinterest spam (DuckDuckGo is terrible for that)
To be fair, more often than not I find stuff by going into “siloed sites” (yt, forums, etc) and searching from there than using a search engine, but it’s still good for stuff that are more common but also more of a hassle trying to remember than just searching it quickly (e.g. “how do I add my user to sudoers again?” kind of stuff)
I live in the US, and we’ve seen a rise in some particularly hostile legislation against certain groups of people like in the LGBTQ community. I can foresee precise tracking being used against these groups of people to determine if they’ve been in the vicinity of a medical provider’s office, have traveled across state lines, congregate in certain social establishments, and even perhaps where they vote for representatives.
This information could be used as targeting information for harassment or further punitive legislation. Voting districts could be redrawn to split these populations into minority regions such that they don’t have proportional share of representatives. Liquor licenses for “gay bars” could be revoked. Maybe we extend the liquor license revocations to bars which simply tolerate LQBTQ people getting a beer after work.
Maybe tomorrow we change the targeted groups to Muslims. Or maybe NRA members. With the foundations for this kind of surveillance in place, the opportunity for abuse will never go away.
But the comment you’re replying to is talking about day-to-day life. Not for most of us, but unfortunately some minorities are being targeted in some places, and the trend seems to be getting worse, not better, in the whole world.
You could have also referenced the abortion issue, where it’s been proven without a shadow of a doubt that police are using surveillance powers to monitor women who are suspected of being pregnant and trying to terminate the pregnancy. It’s literally already happening in one instance, which helps prove that you’re very right in being worried about the things you’re worried about. Because those things will surely come to pass as well.
I disagree with you just slightly. I don’t think that focus should be on gay or whatever group the news is taking about. We are all unique and we all diserve privacy and freedom.
the answer is yes, unless you’re on GrapheneOS. Google Services is a privileged app and therefore it can bypass permissions as it sees fit.
GrapheneOS (optionally) installs it as a unprivileged app, which you can restrict permissions to. Still, I wouldn’t recommend installing it since they have extensive telemetry.
I wouldn’t be so sure about the possibility of a bypass. I’ve heard that system applications have more privileges, but sandboxing is still active and permissions work for them.
You can’t disable location permission for google services, so that’s obvious. But microphone/camera permissions can be disabled, that’s why I’m wondering.
There really should be no doubt that a system application can have unlimited and unrestricted access to everything, bypassing all security and sand boxing. That is the extent of the meaning of system app. It’s like having root privileges, admin access.
Whether Google makes use of it or not is something else, but it could be exploiting that privilege and with Google’s history and the fact that the distributed version of android which contains the google services pre installed is a custom version of android of which you’ll never see the source code, you really have to ask yourself.
That’s why GrapheneOS is so important: you are the user and you get to control how Android works: the way it actually should, where if you install google services (which is up to you!) it gets installed under your terms and with your permissions.
Tell me how you know nothing about how Android works, without telling me you know nothing about how Android works. Speak authoritatively once you learn beyond what r/privacy comments tell you.
Would you care to put any weight behind your accusation?
The main issue I’m trying to expose is that any custom distribution by an OEM can implement any app/service the way they want. The android source code is available, any access and permission can be obtained depending on how you implement it in the source code. You can even weaken the security if you want. Any distribution by these OEMs is a secret sauce, you have no way of knowing what shenanigans they are pulling on your phone.
So yes, they can get root access if that’s what they want.
This is not to say they do. I’m just saying we have no way of knowing how things are implemented and hence why open source is so fundamental to security.
Edit: I concede that the strict definition of what considers a system app does not provide with these accesses. I’m saying any custom distribution with built in apps may have been customized to allow for these things to happen. Perhaps this is where we may have misunderstood each other.
No package in Android has the ability to bypass app permission system (introduced with 4.4 KitKat), unless there is an expensive or undiscovered 0day (that allows Pegasus to work), or some malicious “Administrator” user installed onto device allowing to accomplish this. This covers both system and userspace packages. GMS is no different. There exists no evidence to what you claim.
Any distribution by these OEMs is a secret sauce, you have no way of knowing what shenanigans they are pulling on your phone.
Would you care to put your weight behind your claims? If I have to spot a half knowledge person, I just need to spot anyone cheering about GrapheneOS being some kind of revolutionary AOSP fork.
Android, including its OEM and AOSP forks, is fairly very deterministic and not some Madagascar jungle with man-eating plants and magical evil vines.
Just stop blabbering these buzzword phrases “opensource=security” “grapheneos gud” to fuel your confirmation biases.
I’m rooted with GSF, revoking some permissions forcibly from Play Services (most notably location access) causes the device to reboot, and the permission gets restored forcibly.
This never used to happen previously (the permission used to get revoked successfully, and things like Google Timeline would act as if your device had disappeared despite location being enabled). I assume a background update implemented this permission recovery mechanism - i’ve since disabled play store on my device and slowly been culling off my usage of other Google apps
It absolutely can. It took a screenshot of what I was doing without my permission. Only reason why I found out was cause it for a survey they were doing. So I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re doing it all the time without me knowing.
Nonsense and FUD. Google Services is unable to bypass the permission system in Android, just like any other package. GrapheneOS is a fork of AOSP and is no different than AOSP custom ROMs in its core framework.
No, they meant that Google Play Services has telemetry.
Basically, GrapheneOS makes it much safer to use Google Play Services if you have to use it, though it still isn’t entirely safe and should generally be avoided where possible.
Desktop: Google done fucked up. I didnt use FF cause of one of my extensions but I opted out when they started talking about the DRM for webpages.
Mobile: Its just better with Adblock.
I normally don’t jump on bandwagons, but this is the way. After using ublock on firefox on my phone, it was an easy decision to switch from chrome to firefox (librewolf) on my computer too (so everything would sync lol)
I don’t use it because of mobile adblock only. There are multiple private chromium browsers which have mobile adblock, and also one supporting extensions : kiwi browser.
I use Firefox because it’s a competing engine to chromium, and it looks good.
I also have all the synced bookmarks from my PC Firefox, which I use for the same reason, and because I got used to it.
On the other hand, it’s useful to see anime/cryptobro/laser eye pfps since those tend to stereotypically tell you everything you need to know about that person.
unironically and without bad intentions saying this: touch grass. what good does maximum privacy when you don't do anything with it? one major take away for me from caring about privacy was the realization, that i tended to be "terminally online" (given my job needs me to sit in front of a computer during most working hours) and started to live more in the "analogue world". enjoy reading books again. take your family more out, explore your city, the countryside - and turn your phone off. just pretend it's 1998 again. good luck & see you out there, space cowboy!
the internet and it's tools shouldn't be the centerpoint of our private lives. use it when you want/have to or just feel like it, but don't let it dictate your personal habits and relationships. if you want to fuck over big tech and the all-seeing eye of the glowies, just stop feeding them instead just trying to avoid them.
Yeah, I was already in my thirties when the internet was opened up to the general public, and to me there was a kind of sweet spot around 2000 where the internet had begun to be really useful to ordinary people, but people didn’t spend all their time online. I guess the introduction of smartphones is what made the difference.
what good does maximum privacy when you don’t do anything with it?
There is absolutely something to be said about increasing the noise level for interesting signal. If only the people who truly have something to hide (activists, whistleblowers, journalists, etc) use privacy tools, then they stand out like a beacon in the night. If we all take the same measures they are much much harder to pin point.
It absolutely is a sliding scale, which is why you trust some people more than others. You have friends you can trust with some things and not others. Same thing with companies. I realize their somewhat shady but a far cry better than those I mentioned.
Trust is a sliding scale. The majority of Braves code (at least for their browser) is open source, this means you should at least trust them more than companies whos products are wholly proprietary.
Proton. It replaced PIA for me when it was introduced. Since I was already paying for Proton mail, there was no reason to keep paying for a separate VPN as well.
Same story, made the switch and now I use the ecosystem except the password manager. It’s a bunch of solid products. Tad Expensive (compared to free like Gmail) but I’m happy.
I’ve been trying out the password manager these past couple weeks to see how it compares to Bitwarden. Overall I’ve been impressed. Auto fill actually seems to be superior on Proton as it works on some sites that Bitwarden never would for me. My only real complaint at the moment is that the iOS app will log out of my account at random and it’s a hassle to log back in since I don’t always have my Proton pw on hand.
Really? Protonmail doesn’t have a clean track record. They backtracked their TOS, their onion site forwards to the clearnet, and they outed a French climate activist.
I’ve never had a problem on Firefox. What is the complaint people have about browser tabs in Firefox? The only complaints I’ve seen have been strictly cosmetic.
I do agree it would be nice to have more folders for my mobile bookmarks. It’s actually one thing that perplexes me. Seems like such a basic thing. It definitely would not make me switch browsers, though, especially not to Brave.
Edit: Perhaps ironically, I just remembered the thing that made me switch from Chrome on Android once and for all was their insistence on displaying browser tabs as cards. At the time, I had heard many of the same myths and half-truths about Firefox that are being shared in this thread (slow, buggy, won’t recognize certificates). Happily, I discovered none of these things were accurate, and in fact if anything it ran faster and more efficiently on my device. It was at that point that I also started becoming more concerned about my privacy, and I subsequently learned that I was already using the best browser where privacy is concerned – I just had to adjust a few settings and switch to a different branch. Funny how “better browser tabs” is hailed as a reason to use a chromium-based browser, when I found the better browser tabs in Firefox all along!
Chromium browsers could one day be forced to adopt Google Chrome’s updates to maintain their licenses. This could mean that Chrome’s war against ad-block could spread even to Brave. That gives Google too much control over the internet for any one company.
It definetly can happen. Using Firefox is very important this days. Definetly. So do I. Giving all control about WEB to Google is too bad idea. But it is reality we see.
Firefox Android extension support is a killer feature. Use it extensively. I was talking about some extensions that are not available on desktop Firefox compared to chromium browsers.
For me, everything is OK. But I heard people that needed very specific extensions for work/hobby/productivity that are not available in Firefox. So Brave will be just better on desktop then 🙂
That’s in your head. I cannot think of anything Firefox won’t do for me. And if I came across something I needed chromium for, I would open it that one time. My privacy is worth that tiniest bit of effort.
As an independent computer consultant full time, I operate heavily through my browser for a good 60% of my work.
Tabs folders on Android is a big reason to use Brave instead of Firefox. Tab management is way better. Not some habit. Straight facts. But Firefox has different benefits. F.E. multiple search engines to use in search bar.
Tab folders became such a nuisance for me on Chrome Mobile I started using Firefox. I keep only 5-6 tabs open at a time, webpages opening in the same tab group thing was just too confusing for my very lean tab management mind. Now my 5 tabs really had “9 tabs”.
For me, there are a few plugins that don’t exist on Firefox, which I need. The plugin environment isn’t nearly as robust or kept up-to-date as chromium-based browsers.
I’d be interested to hear which plugins you are referring to as my experience with Firefox has been much the opposite. I often find the plug-in selection lacking when required to use a Chromium based browser.
Fair enough. That’s a fairly niche case, but I could see myself using a chromium browser if I had to use this tool at work, but then switching back to Firefox for everything else.
I still wouldn’t use Brave, though, and it would be even better if more developers started supporting Firefox instead.
From what I remember, autoridade tributaria had some buttons or links that wouldn’t do anything on firefox. I remember suspecting it was javascript, but then noticed that Chrome didn’t have issues.
Seg social and fundo ambiental had odd behaviors but I can’t remember exactly what they were.
I remember having to use Internet Explorer to do some actions on the autoridade tributária website, like simulating and submitting IRS (even had to download an external application) but that was like 10-12 years ago. More recently, I had to do some stuff with regards to opening and closing my activity (I was on recibos verdes for a while) and did it all through Firefox. Haven’t had to do much else beyond this.
As for seg. social, I just tried to log in and it said my password expired and I had to create a new one. But when I filled in the password fields and tried to click on the button to submit it, it didn’t work. In any browser. Because there was no fucking link associated with the button. So the button did nothing. I had to manually click on the “recover my password” link so I could a create a new one.
When I logged in, I just clicked on a few things, even simulated my retirement pension and everything worked. It’s not much of a test, I know, but it’s something.
Never entered fundo ambiental so I have no idea if it works or not.
Your information is probably no longer accurate then. Firefox has undergone many significant updates even within the past year, and it’s very likely those tools are now fully functional, as I’d suspect at some point they’d have been reported on Bugzilla.
I have to access many US government web sites regularly, including the US IRS web site, and I never have a problem.
Back when I was studying computer engineering I was also an avid fan of firefox and I also kept hearing and parroting those lines. Eventually I gave up and stuck with chromium based browsers. (Also because of other reasons, like some extensions only being available for chrome, html games support, etc)
US and portuguese governments are in different leagues. I would assume that yours has better funding and spends more on their virtual infrastructure. I doubt they are comparable, but it is possible that they fixed those issues that I had meanwhile
It’s probably been fixed. I’m not just “parroting those lines” – I’m suggesting that if you find it’s still not functioning on Firefox, the thing to do is to report the issue. (I had previously said Bugzilla, but they get reported to Web Compat now.) I will mention that our IRS is not known for its efficiency and being up to date lol.
I can see that you’re enthusiast and care about firefox, it’s thanks to people like you that these tools get better. But me, for lack of better words, can’t bring myself to care that much about any piece of software that ain’t related to my job, nevermind reporting issues. I’ll use whatever gives me less trouble in my personal time, if in the future things change for chromium, I’ll come back to firefox.
When I get home I’ll check my extensions and pass you the ones that don’t exist for firefox. Right now the only one I remember isn’t really an extension, it’s the text to speech function of Edge, that uses their AI voices.
Thanks for agreeing to look into this. It’s very frustrating when there are so many users claiming certain add-ons are missing in Firefox without ever being able to provide specific examples. It’s the same thing I see when people mention web sites breaking on Firefox, but no one can ever provide links so someone who is interested in fixing things can help.
And I do understand not feeling led to devote time and energy to troubleshooting. That’s one reason I’d like to understand what you’re looking for. I enjoy spending time in shared spaces with some very active add-on developers as well as communities like the Mozilla forums, so I’d be happy to share anything people feel is missing on your behalf.
Also, I do understand finding certain features convenient that Microsoft and Google can provide, but I’m also aware that some of these features come at the cost of our personal data and privacy, which is also a line one has to draw for oneself. I even know people who won’t join Lemmy due to concerns, so I understand this is a personal choice. It’s just nice to know we have such choices and that they are not forced on us.
This is honestly the first valid drawback I’ve seen in this thread about Firefox. Personally, I have to disable most gesture-based features on my device due to my big clumsy hands and perhaps a bit of an inherited neurological problem, but I understand that most users are not like me.
I’d encourage you to share your needs with the Firefox community. I’ve seen some amazing features and add-ons born out of someone simply stepping forward and pointing out how useful a certain feature would be.
At the time I switched, the built-in blocker worked on a site I regularly used while Firefox+ublock did not (I think it would just prevent things from working or cause infinite ad-loops). If I wasn't looking for an alternative adblocker, would probably have never bothered switching. There's also the "get pocket change from using our browser" thing. Some may have been speculating on the value of BATs?
The way the artist managed to get the top green layer of clothing look sheer over the red is genuinely impressive considering how easy that would be to turn in to a muddy brow mess, especially on silk, which wants to naturally let colours to run in to each other. Really incredible.
I remember this painting. My parents are into antroposphy / theosophy, and we had many old folklore and fairy tail books. I had a poster of him in my bedroom from 'Among Gnomes and Trolls'
Tragically died at 36, 3 years after painting this.
Not really the same but I knew the artist personally in my childhood and it is in the style of the antroposphical movement, which I do not approve of, it is like a cult. We used to go to her farm often and I played on the piano and watch her paint. Her husband was a concert pianist if I recall correct...long time ago.
Adrie Hospes, she made the cover for the Dutch version of Krabat "Meester van de zwarte molen" bij Otfried preußler.
Hahaha, if you remove the stereotype and reference to China, it makes for a reasonable approximation of the visuals and sound, imagining a torrent of rice being blasted at you.
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