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LWD

@LWD@lemm.ee

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LWD ,

Considering how many technicalities Apple is weaseling through right now, it's probably the most legal thing in existence.

Of course, legality does not mean morality, and in this case I would argue it's the opposite

LWD ,

For those posting suggestions, do the providers also require KYC at some point?

I know for a fact that Vultr, Digitalocean, and Namecheap (and a few others people have mentioned to me before) will need your identity at time of purchase.

I can understand why verifying a customer's identity is important to these providers, but at the same time, I'm mostly worried that they will be the victims of some data breach in the future.

LWD ,

An employee of Brave runs that website.

If that doesn't scream conflict of interest, I don't know what does.

LWD ,

A Firefox fork is fine. LibreWolf in particular picks up the pieces Mozilla keeps throwing everywhere, and then makes the browser much more private.

LWD ,

If you think so, the extra features can be disabled from the settings, because LW added an extra section for them too... No hunting through about:config.

LWD ,

Well first, let's stay on the topic of a huge ethical conflict of interest. Do you understand why that's a problem, and how conflicts of interests have been abused throughout history?

LWD ,

This doesn't address my question about how to rationally think about conflicts of interest.

Well, there's a good chance that most people who present technical information publicly are probably involved somewhere in the tech space.

Seems like a bad assumption. Do you trust a scientist paid by BP to tell you how safe BP fuel is for the environment? Do you trust Mark Zuckerberg to tell the United States how private Facebook is?

And after you employ some critical thinking there, maybe your responses will dictate how you would see the presentation of statistics, and whether a dishonest paid actor would be likely to overstate things that make their employer look good and understate things that made their employer look bad, while technically not lying as far as the law is concerned.

LWD ,

How do you feel about ethical conflicts of interest?

LWD ,

Do you hate the Brave CEO for doing the same thing as the Mozilla CEO, but with even less restraint?

Or are you just whining in hopes that nobody will question whether you're being a hypocrite

LWD ,

There's no reason to hate Brave unless you have a political bias against their CEO.

Besides in 2016, when Brave promised to remove banner ads from websites and replace them with their own, basically trying to extract money directly from websites without the consent of their owners

And when the CEO unilaterally added a fringe, pay-to-win Wikipedia clone into the default search engine list.

And in 2018, Tom Scott and other creators noticed Brave was soliciting donations in their names without their knowledge or consent.

And in 2020, when Brave got caught injecting URLs with affiliate codes when users tried browsing to various websites.

Also in 2020, when they silently started injecting ads into their home page backgrounds, pocketing the revenue. There was a lot of pushback: "the sponsored backgrounds give a bad first impression." Further requests were ignored (immediately closed)

And in 2022, when Brave floated the idea of further discouraging users from disabling sponsored messages.

And in 2023, when Brave got caught installing a paid VPN service on users' computers without their consent.

LWD ,

Bigots are privacy experts. The proof is in the radioactive pudding.

LWD ,

Lemmy is one of the least "owned by a single person" projects online.

LWD ,

What an ironic thing to post

LWD ,

If there's something interesting to add to the list, I'm curious. Brave did partner with a criminal organization currently under a $1.1 billion lawsuit, but I don't have enough information about your particular case.

Did the software lock you out or did their servers? Was this reported on anywhere?

LWD ,

Yeah, Firefox lacks features like built-in pop-up ads, full screen homepage ads (those ones are enabled by default), and a VPN you probably didn't even purchase.

Truly, the features I wanted to clog up my hard drive whether I use them or not

LWD ,

Yeah, it's terrible when an entire group of people are discriminated against for a label.

...

LWD ,

The affiliate link one certainly couldn't. It wasn't until people identified it and started complaining that the company had to backpedal.

And even for the scam stuff that can be disabled, why should it be downloaded, installed, and take up space on the hard drive to begin with? If it's so good, they can make it an add-on for people to optionally choose.

LWD ,

Well, the reason that is because brave wants you to use that, same way mozilla wants to you use their account services

Brave cryptocurrency crap = a Firefox account? Come on, at least compare apples to apples.

And also I don't know why you put emphasis on space usage when firefox uses more resources on websites

Because we were talking about how opting out of cryptocurrency crap doesn't fix the issues with it being installed by default.

LWD ,

Because we were talking about how opting out of cryptocurrency crap doesn’t fix the issues with it being installed by default.

You're being disingenuous, another user said that it CAN'T be disabled to which I asked which can't?

I gave a concrete example: when Brave injected affiliate codes into the URL bar, there was no way to disable it.

while ignoring all the useful features that brave has and all the issues and missing features of firefox

Because it's irrelevant and gish gallop is not convincing to me

LWD ,

You are in a post about Brave. If you need to talk about anything but Brave to justify its behavior, the behavior is bad.

And just because Brave is technically currently not engaged in any scams that we know of, does not mean that it has a history of engaging in those scams, or that enabling them by default is good behavior on their part.

LWD ,

Would you consider any of the following examples lies?

https://gizmodo.com.au/2014/04/how-to-lie-with-data-visualization/

LWD ,

Ghostery was also intimately involved with what is now Brave Search, IIRC.

LWD ,

Unless we are to believe that one of the most famously user-friendly companies on the planet just dropped the ball here, it looks like a dark pattern

LWD ,

Sidebery does a pretty good job of managing tab groups from a sidebar, although it's much less ad-hoc

LWD ,

Different use case. Those are containers, which have a similar color... But in Chrome, everything is in one container, the colored tabs are just grouped together and those groups can be collapsed to save horizontal space in the tab bar.

LWD ,

This sounds like Exodus but Exodus is made for apps not websites. Apps are easier because they tend to list all that stuff up front.

LWD ,

There are few things I trust less than a regional data monopoly

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    LWD ,

    Well, not exactly.

    Reddit Lemmy
    Content is public Content is public
    API access is limited API access is limitless
    Vote data is inaccessible Vote data is accessible
    No email needed Email or something else often required
    One privacy policy Basically no privacy policy
    LWD ,

    Could ≠ Should.

    Smarter defaults should be encouraged by products that are made for consumers, not corporations

    LWD ,

    It's no required, but if a server is misbehaving, people could notice and those servers could be defederated. By default, deletions are federated.

    LWD ,

    There's a grim tragedy in how many people in this comment section have either succumbed to defeat or actively seek to advocate against privacy.

    The comments can mostly be boiled down to:

    • My data is online already, and I give up
    • Your data is online already, and you don't deserve control over it
    • I have nothing to hide and nothing to fear (and you should too)

    You will find Fediverse types are far more cynical and antagonistic to privacy than people on other platforms.

    LWD ,

    Can you elaborate on what being "an open forum" means?

    LWD ,

    So regarding an open, public digital space like Twitter, how do you feel about people having the ability to lock their accounts and instantly hide all their tweets from the public?

    Mastodon doesn't have that, but it could.

    My reaction to adding something like that will always be "that would be rad" regardless of previous assumptions about how public an app should be, or truisms like "the Internet is forever", because I believe strongly that trying to fix issues is better than letting them languish unchecked.

    LWD ,

    A lot of Lemmy adopters joined with rose tinted glasses, and came with a lot of good ideas, like getting data out of the hands of big companies, making it easy to access it (as Reddit locked down APIs), etc. Which is all good, but a subset of them believe "not officially belonging to one company" is good enough. As for how your data is handled online, a subset of them believe nothing can be improved, and a subset believes it shouldn't be improved because your data shouldn't belong to you at all.

    And Lemmy is made up of all sorts, so there's overlap between Reddit refugees and diehard fans. That interaction is a lot more implicit here, but the friction is a lot more visible on sites like Mastodon where similar privacy discussions have been happening.

    LWD ,

    I like that there is no "private" accounts. This is a feature not a bug.

    I'm not trying to argue against privacy...

    I appreciate your honesty but this seems to conflict

    LWD ,

    Choosing who to share your data with has been considered a privacy setting since the inception of Facebook and the subsequent erosion of those same settings.

    For example, privacy settings on Facebook are available to all registered users: they can block certain individuals from seeing their profile, they can choose their "friends", and they can limit who has access to their pictures and videos.

    LWD ,

    We were talking about the definition of privacy, and I was giving an example to bolster my definition of it. We can switch to a different topic if you want, but first I want to cement this definition.

    LWD ,

    Chilling.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect

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