Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Epic, The Privacy Browser

epicbrowser.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 130 posts

Re: Epic, The Privacy Browser

#11

Post by nrivadeneira »

I still can't figure out why my browsing data being sold is objectively a bad thing. I don't see how it makes my day-to-day worse in any way. There are plenty of smart people who feel that it's bad, so maybe I'm just missing something, and I'm open to sound logic that convinces me that it's going to make my life worse.

Also, the example they make at the bottom asking the reader to imagine hundreds of people following them around and watching their every move is a bit disingenuous. It's more like a handful of people following millions. At that point in time, you're not much more than a data point.

Re: Epic, The Privacy Browser

#12

Post by metastart »

M4v3R wrote: post #8

This is a nice initiative, but I would like to see the source code of this browser. Without it, I cannot be 100% sure that what Epic devs say is true and it's not an elaborate NSA trick to get our data :). No hard feelings, just in the light of current events as reported by NY Times/Guardian about NSA backdooring popular apps and crypto implementations the paranoid inside me has gotten more active lately.

Source Code coming soon. We've made changes to many chromium files & we're a small team, so haven't had a chance to open source it all in a manageable way. In the meantime, don't hesitate to write us if you want to see any code or know any changes we've made. Or use Wireshark to see requests going in/out! Our philosophy is exactly that -- we don't want you to "trust" us, it should be private by design -- that's how Epic works. So for example, address bar auto-fill is all done locally in your system because we don't believe all your browsing should be passing through anyone's servers.

Re: Epic, The Privacy Browser

#14

Post by vjeux »

You actually lose quite a lot in term of ease of use and performance when trying to be fully anonymous :(

History, Password saving, Auto-suggest, Web Cache, Automatic Browser Updates, Spell check, DNS pre-fetching & cache.

Re: Epic, The Privacy Browser

#15

Post by spolu »

3825 wrote: post #6

I don't mean to offend you but how does Hidden Reflex make money from and/or fund Epic, the Privacy Browser?

They also note that they are routing your searches through their proxy; right there they could monetize. But it would be self defeating...

Re: Epic, The Privacy Browser

#18

Post by simias »

nrivadeneira wrote: post #11

I still can't figure out why my browsing data being sold is objectively a bad thing. I don't see how it makes my day-to-day worse in any way. There are plenty of smart people who feel that it's bad, so maybe I'm just missing something, and I'm open to sound logic that convinces me that it's going to make my life worse. Also, the example they make at the bottom asking the reader to imagine hundreds of people following…

I think the problem is that it's creating an infrastructure that can then be used for nefarious purposes.

And then there's no way for you to know when the line is crossed between what you consider tolerable and what you feel infringes on your privacy.

Re: Epic, The Privacy Browser

#19

Post by metastart »

nrivadeneira wrote: post #11

I still can't figure out why my browsing data being sold is objectively a bad thing. I don't see how it makes my day-to-day worse in any way. There are plenty of smart people who feel that it's bad, so maybe I'm just missing something, and I'm open to sound logic that convinces me that it's going to make my life worse. Also, the example they make at the bottom asking the reader to imagine hundreds of people following…

There are hundreds of companies that track you actually and they sell that data to many, many others. In an average hour of browsing, about 40 will try to track you. What you browse & search is very personal and very revealing - it's dangerous that anyone have that data and use it to determine what prices to charge you for goods, for insurance or whether you should even be offered a policy, or more e.g. searching for "pressure cooker" and "backpacks" led to a visit from six FBI agents to a writer. https://medium.com/something-like-falling/2e7d13e54724 ...there are tons more examples I could provide!

Re: Epic, The Privacy Browser

#20

Post by metastart »

spolu wrote: post #10
M4v3R wrote: post #8

This is a nice initiative, but I would like to see the source code of this browser. Without it, I cannot be 100% sure that what Epic devs say is true and it's not an elaborate NSA trick to get our data :). No hard feelings, just in the light of current events as reported by NY Times/Guardian about NSA backdooring popular apps and crypto implementations the paranoid inside me has gotten more active lately.

Additionally it's based on Chromium, so there's not much source code to hide as many of us have a good idea of what the source code would look like.

Coming soon!! Write us if you want to see anything now!!
Post reply on HN