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Brave, the false sensation of privacy

ebin.city

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Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#61

Post by gruez »

elliekelly wrote: post #32
gman83 wrote: post #18

I always find it odd that we worry so much about how much our browsers are tracking us, but almost nothing about what our ISPs are doing. Every time I've looked into it, it seems much worse. As far as I can tell, ISPs are legally allowed to sell your browsing history to third parties: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/for-sale-your-pr...

I only know enough about networking to be dangerous but I am convinced Comcast is doing shady shit with my modem when I change the DNS settings to use non-Comcast servers. Every once in a while I’ll attempt to use Wireshark to try to make sense of what’s happening but I’m pretty clueless and don’t really know what I’m looking at/for. If anyone knows any good resources to learn about the ISP nuts and bolts that make i…

>I am convinced Comcast is doing shady shit with my modem when I change the DNS settings to use non-Comcast servers

Well that's vague. What are the symptoms? How would comcast even know that you changed DNS settings? It's possible to infer that from DNS queries to their servers dropping off and traffic to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.4.4 increasing, but I doubt comcast is competent enough to build that sort of detection system.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#62

Post by athenas_owls »

auslegung wrote: post #2

I’ve been using Brave to watch YouTube videos in incognito mode ever since 1Blocker on Safari stopped blocking YouTube ads. This article brings up some good points, and I want to support Firefox more anyway, so I need to see how Firefox handles YouTube ads.

uBlock Origin with Firefox seems to work really well for blocking video ads. For me it doesn't just block YouTube ads, it manages to block adverts from a couple other streaming sites I use too.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#63

Post by capableweb »

seibelj wrote: post #20
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #11

I find Brave Rewards very egregious. You get lots of BAT and the marketing copy hypes it up immensely without mentioning, anywhere, that you need to provide your SSN and Driver's License to a third-party (Uphold) if you actually, you know, want to cash out. This seems particularly irritating because, let's say you set your browser to show you the max amount of ads for a while. You saved up for a few months, decided y…

I think your anger is misplaced - you should be angry at government who requires Brave (and eBay, and Etsy, and any company that is paying out money to people) to require this. If this wasn’t legally required they (and every other company) wouldn’t do it.

Brave, Inc has no requirement to be located in the US that does require these laws, hardly the fault of the government they are choosing to be incorporated under that Brave chooses that particular geographical position, especially since the US probably has some of the worst examples in recent history for disregarding the privacy of citizens and non-citizens alike.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#64

Post by jccalhoun »

I currently have Firefox, Edge, and Chrome open. I also have Opera and Vivaldi installed (and I think I might have Maxthon too). I use them for different purposes. Firefox for personal stuff, Chrome on my second monitor for social networks and twitch, Edge for my main work. Vivaldi for my part time job. I say the more browsers the better and I am definitely rooting for Firefox to help chip away at chromium's dominance.

I don't have Brave installed because I am not overly concerned with privacy and the other browsers seem fast enough. I have ublock origin, noscript, and privacy badger installed on Firefox. That is good enough for me. I also think BAT is not really worthwhile.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#65

Post by npteljes »

ForHackernews wrote: post #41
gman83 wrote: post #18

I always find it odd that we worry so much about how much our browsers are tracking us, but almost nothing about what our ISPs are doing. Every time I've looked into it, it seems much worse. As far as I can tell, ISPs are legally allowed to sell your browsing history to third parties: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/for-sale-your-pr...

Almost everything is SSL-secured now. There's not very much an ISP can snoop on. DNS lookups and IP addresses, I guess.

How are IPs "not much"? I get that you mean that they don't see the requests and responses themselves, but you can easily infer interests, life events, other particularities from the request targets and the timings alone.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#66

Post by mordymoop »

In 2001 or so I considered entering into an encrypted email correspondence with my brother, for fun. I quickly gave up on the idea because I realized that I didn’t trust that my computer or my brother’s computer didn’t already have spyware of some kind, I didn’t trust the integrity of any encryption/decryption tools that existed, didn’t trust myself not to lose the passwords or leave them lying around, and didn’t trust that some day I wouldn’t just stupidly leave my laptop somewhere with the password entered. Etc., etc. It was obvious that actually having even one meaningfully secret conversation would actually require involved and somewhat ridiculous lifestyle changes.

Having thought this through long ago, I have never understood why people behave as though a chat client or browser that they download from the open internet would be meaningfully secure.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#67

Post by hiidrew »

I understand Eich has been controversial and Brave gets a lot of flak in return, regardless of issues like the ones raised in the article. Yet, I remain a fan of Brave because of Brave Rewards. I love being rewarded based on my usage, even if the amount is worthless and the ads are random crypto shit. The idea of a company actually spreading revenue based on my attention back to me makes me happy and I wouldn't mind if more ad-based services do this.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#68

Post by toolz »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #11

I find Brave Rewards very egregious. You get lots of BAT and the marketing copy hypes it up immensely without mentioning, anywhere, that you need to provide your SSN and Driver's License to a third-party (Uphold) if you actually, you know, want to cash out. This seems particularly irritating because, let's say you set your browser to show you the max amount of ads for a while. You saved up for a few months, decided y…

To add to this, Brave appears to force you to use Uphold in order to "verify" your wallet. So this is absolutely Brave hiding your coins from you until you dox yourself with a third-party.

It's entirely possible to trade bat for many other coins on exchanges without KYC, but Brave forces you to be unable to do that (regardless of your local laws it seems?)

This is something Brave could easily fix by just exposing an API to allow you to do what you want with your BAT instead of forcing you to use a third party KYC service.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#69

Post by vntok »

atatatat wrote: post #49
ForHackernews wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost everything is SSL-secured now. There's not very much an ISP can snoop on. DNS lookups and IP addresses, I guess.

the timing and size of everyone's connection to everything is "not very much"?

Indeed it is not. Unless of course you find a way to map the timing and size of a pageload to its potentially sensitive content, in which case do tell.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#70

Post by yoz-y »

pwdisswordfish8 wrote: post #57
yoz-y wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the amount of VPNs popping out it seems that there is more than almost none worrying.

It’s not like VPNs don’t have the exact same problem, though…

They do, but at least in theory, their business model is built on not selling the information.
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