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Protonmail Recommended Browsers

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Re: Protonmail Recommended Browsers

#121

Post by garmanarnar »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #7

Protonmail and Brave do indeed seem like a good fit. Two somewhat sketchy, very commercial outfits that market themselves as more private than the competition and that will gladly break existing standards and practices to so. They also seem to attract surprisingly similar groups of users, including a larger-than-chance overlap. Protonmail, in particular, seems to have become a sort of running joke as the e-mail provi…

The 'commercial'ness of Protonmail is why I trust it. The email company makes money by charging for email accounts. Very straightforward.

Re: Protonmail Recommended Browsers

#122

Post by koheripbal »

the_duke wrote: post #115
mherrmann wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I do consulting work for Brave. Opinions my own. Maintaining a browser is a huge amount of work. The web evolves constantly and security fixes are extremely important. Being competitive in the space requires a very large amount of engineering resources. A commercial entity has a sustainable path to providing those resources. While nobody likes ads, I think they're opt-in in Brave and at the end of the day…

The difficulty is , as always, incentives. Brave is an ad company, in the sense that their only revenue is from ads. Brave has every motivation to make external tracking as useless as possible, because it increases the relative competitiveness of their own ad platform. Since they own the browser, they can track as much as they want. I'm not saying that they do this today, their implementation might be very privacy fo…

> Brave is an ad company, in the sense that their only revenue is from ads.

This is like saying non-profits are donation companies. It's stretching the definition to make a point and ultimately circular logic.

Re: Protonmail Recommended Browsers

#123

Post by matheusmoreira »

jussion_zoonist wrote: post #90
Barrin92 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes. Brave is functionally sort of like a mafia protection racket. They just insert themselves between you and whatever you're browsing, block everyone else's ads, and insert their own. except their ads are supposedly the good ones, and they cut you in on it by giving you some of their made up token currency

Brave Ads are better than the ads they block in my opinion. They are opt in. They aren't targeted/tracking. They appear as notification bubbles so they don't disrupt page content. They don't run javascript which can be a security and performance problem.

I agree. As far as advertising goes, they're almost tolerable. I never thought I'd ever see the day an advertiser would allow people to turn off the ads.

Re: Protonmail Recommended Browsers

#125

Post by jaywalk »

throw101010 wrote: post #101
shubhamkrm wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it’s really a throwaway (just a one time use for creating an account), I simply use 10minutemail.com

Many websites now refuse to create an account for you if your email uses a more exotic domain, or especially the domains used by the many temporary email address providers unfortunately.

My email's domain is as exotic as it gets (I own it, and I'm the only one using it) and I've yet to encounter a website that rejects it.

Temporary email address providers though, yeah. I've seen plenty of rejects with those.

Re: Protonmail Recommended Browsers

#127

Post by tingle »

ridgered4 wrote: post #63

I was until recently using protonmail for throwaway email addresses for various web forums as it allowed a captcha verification during creation. Every other one I'd tried demands SMS verification these days, which is right out. But proton mail recently changed and requires SMS or another email now, I believe they say it is to combat bots. I tried tutanota but it refuses to create an account at all over a VPN, or at l…

Were you using Tor Browser ? From Switzerland, I can create free Proton accounts by solving a captcha, if I'm using Safari or Firefox. But if I use Tor on the same computer, the only option is to enter a phone number.

Re: Protonmail Recommended Browsers

#128

Post by mattarm »

mherrmann wrote: post #36
openplatypus wrote: post #18

Why do privacy folks recommend Brave? Isn't Brave a commercial, ad serving entity?

Disclaimer: I do consulting work for Brave. Opinions my own. Maintaining a browser is a huge amount of work. The web evolves constantly and security fixes are extremely important. Being competitive in the space requires a very large amount of engineering resources. A commercial entity has a sustainable path to providing those resources. While nobody likes ads, I think they're opt-in in Brave and at the end of the day…

> A commercial entity has a sustainable path to providing those resources....

[...]

> ...having seen some of the internal discussions, I trust Brave a lot when it comes to privacy.

I felt similarly about Google while I worked there. There were and still are a great many very skilled people focusing on security and privacy within Google, with good intentions. I personally had my own work vetted multiple times for security related stuff, and I was quite impressed.

Yet, Google has grown a bit of a PR problem with respect to privacy issues.

The (potential) problem is structural. Commercial entities exist to make money for investors. Protecting user privacy is a different goal. We also live in a world of grey areas, so judgement calls need to be made.

What structurally prevents the Brave corporation from changing once those people leave, leadership changes, acquisitions happen or Brave is acquired?

I see no particular structural reason to trust Brave more than Google. They're both companies that go to great lengths to respect and preserve user privacy. They're both corporations that exist to make money for investors.

What would I trust even more than Brave or Google? Something run under some form of governance that is legally accountable at a primary and structural level to what it is actually aiming to provide (e.g. privacy) rather than to making money (most every corporation in the world).

Re: Protonmail Recommended Browsers

#129

Post by ragnese »

alexmingoia wrote: post #82
cyberpunk wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, apple takes a copy of your browsing history, apparently “anonymously” and you can’t opt out. Don’t use it.

Their iCloud security page says “Safari History, Tab Groups, and iCloud Tabs” is end-to-end encrypted. So they store history to sync across devices but the keys are only on your devices. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303

Are the "keys" just your iCloud password (or a deterministic derivative thereof)? Otherwise, how could your tabs magically appear on a new device?

Re: Protonmail Recommended Browsers

#130

Post by ragnese »

nextstep wrote: post #78

What’s wrong with Safari privacy-wise?

Probably nothing; Apple talks a good privacy talk and I always recommend Apple products to my non-nerd friends and family because of it.

HOWEVER, I can't really get past the fact that it's closed source. At the end of the day, that means that Apple can say they do XYZ practice, and it's very likely to be true (some is testable, and imagine the shit-storm if a whistle blower showed that they really do store your keys, etc), but what if it does something else sketchy "instead" of the things they promise they aren't doing?

Pretty much, if I care about privacy, closed source anything never makes it on my list.

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