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.
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Check out our website at privacyguides.org before asking your questions here. We've tried answering the common questions and recommendations there!
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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.
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Okay, this article makes it sound like they found some hidden thing deep in obscure windows settings about brave doing something bad.
On truth, they just installed Windows Services for their VPN to enable users to use the service. That's what many apps do for dozens of reasons.
I dislike Brave as much as the next guy, but let's stick to things they really fuck up and not make Up issues that aren't there.
As somebody who routinely checks their window services looking for rogue applications adding yet another background service. It's not cool. I don't expect my browser to have a background service. Chrome has a background service updater in Windows. That's terrible too.
I agree it is people looking for reasons to criticize. However, I do think VPN or anything that modifies your route tables should be subjected to more scrutiny than other app features due to potential for abuse. I wish browsers wouldn't bundle them at all, or install them as part of their base.
Especially considering they were injecting affiliate links/replacing affiliate links with their own, everything they do should be seen through that lens. They literally thought it was either OK to do which means that behavior like this is going to happen and keep happening with them, OR they thought they could get away with it which ends up with the same result.
The same company that was modifying the content of the pages as an opt-out feature deeply hidden in the setting? (e.g. bitcoin stuff on every Reddit link)
Surely you trust them with all of your traffic, though? They sound like good stewards and of course you'd want their VPN installed without your consent and you can definitely trust it's not doing anything bad, right?
This is my shocked face, the company with a history of ignoring user agency and doing shady shit... Does some shady shit and ignores user agency.
Open article -> get prompted for notifications and full-screen cookie consent pop up -> deny notifications -> click through cookie menu, accept -> finally see article for .5 nano seconds -> trending articles popup -> click the x on trending -> tab crashes.
I think I know why people only read the headline nowadays.
You get what you deserve if you use Brave. It will only get worse.
Well, there's a way to frame this as malicious. I'm not a fan of Brave, but it also installs, say, a spell checker without consent, or a Tor client. Sure, the code is there even if you don't use it, but... What's the actual harm?
The harm is that it’s installed. There is no reason for doing this. It can be done on demand in one second if the user subscribes to their VPN.
It also shows once once again that they keep on doing their shady shit and still cannot be trusted (or at least that they are a bunch of incompetent developers).
You know Firefox installs a bunch of stuff by default as well, right?
They don't want to hear that.
I mean, yes, it could've been differently, and as I understand it they're going to. But as a user, how is your life worse with this than without this? What's the impact of something being installed but not running?
I mainly use brave as an alternative browser for when things are acting a bit iffy on Librewolf.
Yesterday I saw their VPN service running on the task manager. Hadn't used brave for a week. Immediately uninstalled.
I think you've double-posted
I have deleted the previous post, but there seems to be a synchronization problem with other instances
Yeah, weirdly it shows up as a cross-post to the same community but not every client shows them both at once. I've seen it before and I think it was to do with cross-instance syncing then as well.
I've discovered a new browser to use as a secondary one to Firefox in case I needed a chromium based one. Thorium. This thing is insanely fast. Brave what?
Ive liked iron. it doesn't look to do anything but remove da google.
I originally started using brave because at the time it was the most feature complete alternative to chrome. Now I would like to switch but I would still use chrome cast for music streaming (I have quite a few of them).
Last time I checked casting audio was missing as a feature in most deGooogled versions of chrome. Does anyone have any suggestions for browsers that allow me to stream audio from my browser to Google Chromecast?
Can you stream audio from VLC?
I’m clearly out of the loop with the hate towards Brave. Why all the hate? Also, if it’s hated so much why is it still recommended on Privacy Guides?
EDIT Thank you for all the informative responses!
Why all the hate?
Have you read the article? They install their VPN before the user decides to use that service, when they could simply install it when the user decides to subscribe to their VPN.
I'm going to be downvoted for this but it's recommended on privacy guides because they generally lack strict criteria with browsers. Both Firefox and Brave make automatic connections that shouldn't be allowed.
Also, if it’s hated so much why is it still recommended on Privacy Guides?
Non-unironically, Brave paid shills.
@governorkeagan @throws_lemy Privacy Guides has a set of objective criteria to judge a browser's security and privacy. People tend to hate Brave for reasons unrelated to security and privacy. Like the CEO's politics, crypto (and recently AI) integration in the browser, some shady history about injecting referral codes, etc.
Personally, I wish I could find an alternative that is as good as Brave. Until then, I'll keep using it as it is perfect for my needs.