141–150 of 154 posts
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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
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Well... Protonmail happens to be the only e-mail provider that cannot fully be used as intended using just NMAP, because the core feature is its proprietary encryption and related features. So I would guess it's probably a singular outlier in having more web client users, rather than less.
Nitpick: I think you meant IMAP (a standard email client protocol) instead of NMAP (a port scanning program).
It's good to see Firefox on top of this list. Is Protonmail usually accessed through web clients? I only use native iOS client and MacOS Mail with the Bridge app. Somehow I would expect Protonmail users to not use the web client so much, maybe I am wrong.
Well... Protonmail happens to be the only e-mail provider that cannot fully be used as intended using just NMAP, because the core feature is its proprietary encryption and related features. So I would guess it's probably a singular outlier in having more web client users, rather than less.
As an aside, I'm looking to move to proton. Any feedback on how good and prompt is their customer care?
I've moved all my email to Proton over the course of the last year or so. Each interaction I've had with customer support as been great, resolving my issues usually same day as I've opened the ticket. Only two downsides in my mind is the lack of an iOS calendar app (its in closed beta atm) and twice since I've signed up they have suffered multi-hour outages that left me without access to email.
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The short answer is that yes, Brave as a company does have some competing incentives which rightly should be constantly criticised, HOWEVER, Brave the browser performs well in multiple independent reviews of browser privacy. A nice one is https://privacytests.org/ , though there are also some academic studies which I will link if I find.
I wonder how Brave compares to (Firefox + uBlock Origin + Privacy Badger).
Brave's adblock is actually based on the filtering used by ublock (check out the filter list pages for both browsers!). However, it is inferior to ublock on Firefox (or librewolf) as there is more sophisticated CNAME uncloaking (among other things) on FF/LW.
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The short answer is that yes, Brave as a company does have some competing incentives which rightly should be constantly criticised, HOWEVER, Brave the browser performs well in multiple independent reviews of browser privacy. A nice one is https://privacytests.org/ , though there are also some academic studies which I will link if I find.
"Independent tests" PrivacyTests.org is run by a Brave employee (Arthur Edelstein) He is extremely smart person though, just that money can taint any good intentions easily. Especially in a very "shark" ecosystem.
Here is one more source - one of the academic studies I mentioned. https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf
It is not a comprehensive argument that "brave better", just that it sends less tracking information by default. Still, I think that's an important metric.
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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
> block everyone else's ads Nothing wrong with that. Every browser should do that by default. > except their ads are supposedly the good ones You can literally turn them off. Only way for advertising to get better than that is to stop existing. Also, if you do turn them on, they're the most benign ads I've ever seen. Basically a small text notification. Easily dismissed and ignored. > they cut you in on it by giving…
of course it is. It's a pre-mined token that has only one incentive, and that is to get more people to use Brave and BAT. They could have simply payed you in dollars, Ethereum or Bitcoin directly, right? No harder to credit you with an existing, relatively stable crypto currency. The difference is of course, they would have to actually pay for that and you'd have no incentive to pump up the currency.
it's pretty genius in a way to bolt a MLM scheme on top of a browser.
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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.
Not sure how true that is. Non profits definitely rely on donations as their sole income, and are incentivized to take actions to maximize donations, but the difference is that (ideally) they can't really line their own pockets with the income that comes in. So the only reason they would maximize their income is to put more money into the things that they do.
This is not the case with Brave. The browser is a front, or a channel, for their token and ad network. They only need to keep the browser part of it functional enough to keep traffic. They have no real incentive to improve the browser beyond that point, especially if other competitors stagnate and the money keeps coming in.
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…
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I wonder how Brave compares to (Firefox + uBlock Origin + Privacy Badger).
Privacy Badger is not recommended these days. It actually makes you more fingerprintable in some cases. Its better to use in-browser anti fingerprinting. Brave's adblock is actually based on the filtering used by ublock (check out the filter list pages for both browsers!). However, it is inferior to ublock on Firefox (or librewolf) as there is more sophisticated CNAME uncloaking (among other things) on FF/LW.