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Epic, The Privacy Browser

epicbrowser.com

101–110 of 130 posts

Re: Epic, The Privacy Browser

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For example: Google "lump in the testicles" and browse medical sites. Then wait one week and try to get mortgage or insurance. I'm calling bullshit on this one unless you can provide a concrete example.

http://verdict.justia.com/2012/01/03/will-insurers-begin-to-...

This link has nothing to do with your original scenario of googling for "testicular cancer" and subsequently getting denied for insurance or a mortgage. It's about social media. Social media != anonymized search data.

There is a huge difference between publicly stating for the whole world to see that you have cancer by posting it to Facebook and searching google and browsing webmd and an insurer somehow surfacing that search and browsing intent and then acting on it. You backed up nothing.

Re: Epic, The Privacy Browser

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it it gives companies advantage over you. For example banks and insurance companies want to know everything possible about you. So do potential employers. Profiling people and putting them into categories and calculating their risk profiles makes their position weaker. For example: Google "lump in the testicles" and browse medical sites. Then wait one week and try to get mortgage or insurance.

Except companies like Mozilla and Google (even Microsoft) don't give that data to those companies, and have no incentive to do so. Indeed, to a company like Google that would be corporate suicide as it would undermine their main source of revenue. Google's money comes from being a middle man, they want to keep their competitive advantage (your data to target ads) secret more than you do. So your scenario doesn't exis…

What hannibal5 says: Trackers are there after you're off of Google's site(they know whether you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness' sake), and Firefox doesn't need to phone home to Mozilla for your browser to enable others to track you.

In other words, neither Google nor Mozilla has to be involved to track you.

Let me lay out a specific scenario.

It's easy enough for insurance companies (or a 3rd party who's willing to sell that data to an insurance company) to run genuinely informative health sites that have good rankings on Google's SERP, and thus get high clickthrough. Such a site can on clickthrough set a cookie on your client for you, and/or fingerprint your browser (c.f., EFF's panopticlick), and/or use an ETag as a 'cookieless cookie'/browser identifier.

Once they've got a way to identify past behavior for a browser (i.e., look up health concerns for an identifier), they have something to sell to insurers.

Okay, well, clicking on an organic result is a weak signal of health risk / pre-existing condition, all you know is they ended up on a page.

Suppose you, as an insurer, want a stronger signal of whether the person using that browser has a health risk/pre-existing condition. Just put out some AdWords. Here's where Google really helps a website build valuable, saleworthy data.

    Search for something:
    https://www.google.nl/#q=breast+check

    Click adwords ad for breastcancer.org

    Opens a page to: http://www.breastcancer.org/symptoms/testing/types/self_exam/bse_steps?gclid=CMC0rI74uLkCFQSS3godSSAA_Q

    With this value in the HTTP request's Referer header:

    http://www.google.nl/aclk?sa=l&ai=CA_XBGe0qUqOhD4e--QbWkoHoBqzGitEBlN6ongr-x6YMCAAQAVCVu9RFYJGEk4X8F6AB7qeO_wPIAQGqBCBP0MOny_HlmSNBJ-QDgpzV0OqbNNjg7FAjv3nX9hy9u4AH-tdx&sig=AOD64_1DSbXWQm-KpW0fMRFiY3lcjn3kQg&rct=j&q=breast+check&ved=0CCwQ0Qw&adurl=http://www.breastcancer.org/symptoms/testing/types/self_exam/bse_steps.jsp

    I was logged into my Google account while I did this.

    Google empties the Referer for organic results always (if I've read&remembered correctly, for a few years they scrubbed Referer only for logged-in users, as a privacy boon). But they still leave it for their paying advertisers!
So, if you run breastcancer.org and put out some ads and are selling your data to insurers, you now can link search terms to impressions to clickthroughs to a browser identifier. Then you just need to offer a low-latency service that serves the insurer a list of health conditions for which a particular browser seems to be at-risk for.

Note that all of this works end-to-end, so SSL/TLS doesn't prevent the host serving a clickthrough from sharing data.

The part where your browser is identifiable (uses etags, sends cookies, presents a consistent fingerprint) is the weakest link.

Disclaimer: I have no reason to believe breastcancer.org is anything but altruistic, I just needed to find a medical condition for which there was a clickable AdWords ad and which is expensive to treat.

Re: Epic, The Privacy Browser

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://verdict.justia.com/2012/01/03/will-insurers-begin-to-...

This link has nothing to do with your original scenario of googling for "testicular cancer" and subsequently getting denied for insurance or a mortgage. It's about social media. Social media != anonymized search data. There is a huge difference between publicly stating for the whole world to see that you have cancer by posting it to Facebook and searching google and browsing webmd and an insurer somehow surfacing tha…

It was meant to be taken as literal case. Just as example of how it will be used.

Re: Epic, The Privacy Browser

#104

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…

That's probably because you don't grasp what can be done with this data, and for how long this data will be around. The bottom line is in the relation between privacy and freedom.

There's a few point to raise here: how do you object or prevent the sale of your data ? how much of the money from the sale of your data went to your pockets ? what control do you have on your sold data over time ?

Then it's not only about you and your life, ever heard of first they came [1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came

Re: Epic, The Privacy Browser

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://verdict.justia.com/2012/01/03/will-insurers-begin-to-...

This link has nothing to do with your original scenario of googling for "testicular cancer" and subsequently getting denied for insurance or a mortgage. It's about social media. Social media != anonymized search data. There is a huge difference between publicly stating for the whole world to see that you have cancer by posting it to Facebook and searching google and browsing webmd and an insurer somehow surfacing tha…

google tracking != anonymized search data

Re: Epic, The Privacy Browser

#106
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about control and regaining control of your browsing habits, namely giving users the capability of opting out of global surveillance networks. Many advertisers screamed (and are still screaming) bloody murder over Do Not Track settings being on by default, and this is a message to send to them: your screams are irrelevant and you have no right to track me.

I have control of my browsing habits. That's my point - I'm not terribly worried about if companies see what I do, so it doesn't change my behavior. Thus, I don't see how this point shows that tracking makes my life worse.

Are you saying that it is ok to globally disregard privacy, profile users, sell their data/profile without them knowing or getting a part of this profit because it doesn't make your life worse ?

Re: Epic, The Privacy Browser

#107
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) You data has value and it belongs to you. If it is taken with out permission, that is stealing. Bad thing. 2) Taking one cent from your back account every day wont make your day to day life worse. Day to day being worse is not a standard that is useful.

1) I don't agree with this. If I walk into (or around) a Best Buy and they capture my movement on a security camera, are they stealing from me? Technically, they are recording data of my movement. Also, stealing generally infers that the victim is left without the stolen item. That's why we don't call piracy stealing. So, if anything, trackers are 'pirating' my browsing information and possibly reselling it. Truthful…

1) we'll take another example, let's say you have your own religious views and those get collected in a database, seemingly no harm done here. Then comes a newly elected government with different religious views who decides people holding the same religious views as yours should wear a distinctive sign to warn the public, then to gather those people in camps, then starts mass killing those people on an industrial scale. This happened before, if it were to happen again in the future you would have no way of hiding facts about you as everything has been collected about you for years.

Re: Epic, The Privacy Browser

#108
post #51

Is this a re-launch of the Epic browser originally released in 2010 which targeted Indian users? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_(web_browser)

Looks like an attempt at pivoting, jumping of the privacy bandwagon. Doesn't really make a good case that this browser is based on belief of privacy as stated in their faq.

Re: Epic, The Privacy Browser

#110
I cringe when I read their claim to be "the first-ever privacy-focused browser built on chromium". Iron[1] was first released in 2008 to circumvent privacy issues with chrome.

I wonder if they did a really poor job at researching what already exists and are truly clueless about iron, or if they outright lied for marketing purposes. Hopefully they're not clueless about privacy and are not lying about features, though I would not bet my privacy on "hopefully" specially when epic browser website lacks an https version and epic browser bears a unique fingerprint on panopticlick.

[1] https://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php

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