31–40 of 154 posts
Why do privacy folks recommend Brave? Isn't Brave a commercial, ad serving entity?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see critics on Protonmail, but Brave is an absolut legit fully open-sourced project. Nothing Sketchy, and no the opt-in Crypto Program is also nothing sketcht.
The sketchy part is being a Chrome clone while pretending to be a "different" browser.
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…
Can you recommend a paid mail service which is better? I'm in a search process now, to ditch google as much as I can, and was leaning towards Proton services.
From a functionality standpoint I would list, hey.com, fastmail and icloud as better. mailbox.org is better on being a traditional mail host you access using your own client (no wierd bridge app). hey.com and icloud are US hosted if that matters to you.
For the semi selfhosted options https://thehelm.com seems like a really good option.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Proton is good, not sure what OP means by "sketchy". I personally also use Hey and used Fastmail before. All three are great alternatives to Google.
I’m slowly moving to Fastmail. I tried hey. Their app is terrible. The whole thing seems clunky.
Why do privacy folks recommend Brave? Isn't Brave a commercial, ad serving entity?
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 they're a potential source of funding for the necessary development efforts. Brave also has a unique way of serving ads in a privacy-friendly way.
Most of Brave is developed in the open. Where it isn't, there are good reasons why such as for example security. But I'm also privy to some of the internal discussions. It is amazing how much thought and effort the people at Brave put into privacy, even when it is not visible to the outside world. Again serious engineering resources are devoted to changing Google's Chromium implementation to make it better for privacy. One discussion I vaguely remember was how browser caching can be used to fingerprint users in a very subtle way, and Brave engineers thought very long and hard about how to close this particular loophole of the web.
In short, I don't think "commercial" is bad and having seen some of the internal discussions, I trust Brave a lot when it comes to privacy.
Why do privacy folks recommend Brave? Isn't Brave a commercial, ad serving entity?
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.
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.
Why do privacy folks recommend Brave? Isn't Brave a commercial, ad serving entity?
That said: FireFox4Life! (Or at least, until they betray my trust).
So basically there are practically only 3 browsers left in the desktop world(1) - Firefox, Chrome, Safari. Protonmail works on all 3 of them, which is good. But why is this a news worthy topic? (1) not counting obscure ones like Lynx or others.
Why do privacy folks recommend Brave? Isn't Brave a commercial, ad serving entity?