Is this a re-launch of the Epic browser originally released in 2010 which targeted Indian users?
Epic, The Privacy Browser
51–60 of 130 posts
Re: Epic, The Privacy Browser
#52I 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…
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.
Is there any evidence that your example could impact somebody today? Sure, it's just a matter of the right (wrong) people connecting the dots... but is anyone currently doing that?
Re: Epic, The Privacy Browser
#53Earlier 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.
Is there any evidence that your example could impact somebody today? Sure, it's just a matter of the right (wrong) people connecting the dots... but is anyone currently doing that?
Isn't the fact that such a vulnerability exists reason enough to not allow it to happen? I mean, at that point, you're basically trusting the Bad Guys to not do bad things. Look at internet security circa late 1990's to get an idea of how that works.
Re: Epic, The Privacy Browser
#54I 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…
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 exist.
Re: Epic, The Privacy Browser
#55You 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.
Privacy isn't "free", you're right. Epic supports password saving -- since it's the user's choice, we determined that we could leave it in. Many things can be done in a private way, so for example we have implemented local address bar auto-fill, so you can type "f" and have facebook.com appear but it's not based on your history nor any query to a web server. We will be building in more such services to make using Epi…
Can't spell check be a completely local feature without hitting any outside servers? I didn't understand why that was disabled.
Re: Epic, The Privacy Browser
#56I 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…
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.
Re: Epic, The Privacy Browser
#57Is this a re-launch of the Epic browser originally released in 2010 which targeted Indian users? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_(web_browser)
I think it is. I remember the name of the company was hidden reflex. One of my classmates was working for it.
Re: Epic, The Privacy Browser
#58Out of interest, has anyone noticed anything outside of the ordinary? My antivirus (Kaspersky) is flagging it as a Trojan. http://i.imgur.com/qTW8zPu.png
Kaspersky identifies modified versions of popular applications. I suspect they don't know Epic is a "legitimate" modification of Chromium yet.
Re: Epic, The Privacy Browser
#59> Epic automatically routes your searches through its proxy to protect them. Sounds sketchy.
Sorry through a third-party proxy service powered by Spotflux. You're right that if it was powered by us, it would be sketchy in terms of a privacy improvement!
A third-party proxy that I don't select is still sketchy.
I've never heard of Spotflux before, and don't know that they aren't owned and operated by one of your advertising partners.
Re: Epic, The Privacy Browser
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The police were tipped off about the backpack/pressure cooker searcher by their previous employers, not some anonymous internet company: http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/an-update-on-the-pressure-c... They were detectives, not FBI agents.
That's ironic since counterterrorism[1] is the supposed primary mission of the NSA surveillance enabled by FISC / PATRIOT Act.
[1] Provided that you think a simple Googling of "backpack" and "pressure cooker" in the days following the Boston Marathon Attack implies a probable link to terrorism.