New to Lemmy. A privacy advocate. Interested in number theory.
See also:
Secretive White House Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access to Trillions of US Phone Records
The French National Police is unlawfully using an Israeli facial recognition software [installed massively and secretly. The Minister ordered an investigation]
Some of possible solutions include:
Just fyi: recently EFF is creating Privacy Badger browser add-on and GNU also has LibreJS. They’re technically not ad-blockers, though; apparently a tracker-blocker and a non-free-script-blocker, respectively.
That is correct. Tor Browser on Tails comes with uBlock Origin. It might be that DDG (or some other financial supporters) are not happy if the Tor Project ships TB with uBlock. There are many things to be blocked by uB even on DDG, Brave, MetaGer, etc. (although obviously they are much less invasive than you-know-what search engines). Purely privacy-wise they're annoying of course. But understandably they do need to monetize something to provide search engines, and I think some of them are financially supporting the Tor Project too, or they're helping each other, so… I don't know. Just a guess.
Isn't it like Mozilla has to be nice to Google? Ultimately, doesn't this mean that end users are not making enough donations? People say privacy and freedom are important, but normal people really don't like to pay for these important things, like assuming libre is like free beer!
I’ve been a long time Mozilla-supporter, since forever—since much before Firefox was even born. Every browser I use now is also Firefox-based [EDIT: one of them is SeaMonkey, not firefox-bsed but from Mozilla too]. As such, I wouldn’t like to say bad things about Mozilla. While I could clarify what I was trying to say, let’s just say several other people prefer LibreWolf to Firefox (I’m not a LibreWolf user, though).
In the big picture, we don’t want to be abused by big tech companies like Google, and relatively speaking, Firefox is a much better choice. Also, you’re absolutely right about how free software is supposed to work (at least in principle). Like I said, I really hope I’m totally wrong here.
The original (initial) post is a question about Brave, and we’re getting so off-topic now. Besides it seems that most Lemmy users don’t even read anything older than a week anyway, too busy to have a slow, deep conversations. So let’s call it a day. What I was trying to say in passing might become painfully clearer soon enough, or perhaps—hopefully—I’m just overly worrying about nothing. Although maybe Mozilla as an organization can’t exist anymore without Google’s financial supports (and so not in a position to keep saying “No!” to Google for a long time), as you pointed out, let’s hope that the philosophy of free (libre) software will prevail in the end.
Thanks for taking time to dig deeper and share the results. It’s ironic if big search engines are practically assisting those scams.
The main thing behind my previous comment is the SREN bill and Mozilla’s blog post about it.
I hope I am wrong, but I feel that Mozilla, while being against browser-side censorship, is strongly supporting Google-side restrictions. The situation becomes clearer if you actually read SREN, Art. 6, which is based on the premise that browser providers can and will monitor each user’s activity (my post about this on Lemmy). Conceptually similar to WEI.
The technology that restricts what a user can do can be useful, if unquestionably bad things are blocked. The fundamental problem is, in order for this to work, someone has to decide what is “bad” for you, and has to monitor your activities directly or indirectly so that you may not visit “bad” websites. Protecting users from malware may be important, but I don’t want forceful “protection” by for-profit big tech companies, especially when their OSes/services are not really privacy-respecting, if not themselves spyware. While “protection” might not involve real-time monitoring or anything privacy-invasive, the current situation feels preposterous. We should be free to customize programs, free to block what we don’t need; it’s not like they have freedom to block us from accessing info, to force us to use/view what they want us to.
The current use cases are for Brazilian banking sites. Although free (libre) software users don’t like to be remotely monitored their browsing real-time, the technology itself can be helpful if used right.
The context is, even though Firefox is getting more and more annoying with telemetry, phoning home, etc. (imho the last good version was v52 ESR), it is still much better than Google. So use Firefox, if you don’t like other options.
Mozilla is financially supported by Google, and perhaps they can’t continue their projects without Google, so it’s kind of inevitable that sometimes they have to support that giant. Nevertheless, they still try not to be evil, explicitly against WEI.
Please do support Firefox and/or its forks (LibreWolf, Tor Browser, …). Stop cooperating with Google. They can do evil things because of their monopoly power. We can make Google less powerful, if we refuse to use their products, if we escape from their privacy-invading services.
It’s a free country, you can use whatever you like. Respect yourself and your own intuition :)
The current situation (summer July–Sept 2023) is, you better switch to any browser that is not Chromium-based. The reason is “Web Environment Integrity” (WEI), which seems to mean, basically, Google is trying to DRM-lock the whole Internet to make sure you see their ads and they can track everyone. Freedom-loving users obviously don’t like that.
At the same time Firefox is getting more and more annoying, yet it’s better than Google. A safe bet for a general user might be LibreWolf. Another new option is Mullvad Browser.
about time 😊 that’s not the goal; one of the first basic steps!
EDIT Sorry I should not have said it like this. Even though that was my honest feelings, said as free speech without any meany connotations, this should have been treated as good news, like someone finally ditched Windows.
One of the next steps might be to figure out how not to load GA.js GTM.js Google Fonts etc.
There is a long way to go to de-Google oneself, and unfortunately it’s not easy nor trivial. One subtle example: Google is a broker of Tor Snowflake, which could cause a difficult dilemma.