this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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Opera browser? The one that everyone was making a stink about a few years ago? The one owned directly by a Chinese based company, and was supposedly sending telemetry to China?
Why the hell would anyone still be using Opera???
I stopped using Opera the second it wasn't Norwegian. I use Librewolf on desktop, Waterfox on mobile and Vivaldi as the "clean" browser when something k. Waterfox/Librewolf fucks up an important webpage I have to use
The link you shared is the company profile only and doesn't mention any controversy about telemetry being shared with China.
I've been googling for a bit, and there are articles concerned this might happen from 2016 when the takeover was announced, and plenty of discussions on reddit, hacker news, y-combinator, quora and even on the official Opera forum (not deleted or redacted, mind you), but there wasn't any clear evidence that telemetry is being shared.
While the concern remains valid, I'm also asking myself whether it's that much worse than Chrome, Brave or Firefox sending telemetry to the US? I'm neither American nor Chinese, and would consider both governments hostile. Which one of them has access to my data is merely a choice between plague and cholera.
So in the end it's on informed users to block transmission of telemetry themselves, regardless of their browser of choice.
I would rather give my data to Firefox than a company who's entire business model is selling user data. That being said, you could use librewolf which removes telemetry. I use both Firefox and librewolf
Mozilla seems to be transitioning to becoming an advertising company so I wouldn't want them to have my data either.
Some people would rather give their data to opera then firefox 🤦♂️
I'm using Fennec which also removes telemetry, but many standard users are not comfortable installing apps that aren't on Google play.
The amount of people who only feel comfortable downloading on Google Play and also care about privacy I feel like is very small but I don't know.
I want to upvote this.
I want to downvote this.
So I guess I will do neither since I can't do both.
Plus the whole exploiting poor people thing: https://www.engadget.com/2020-01-19-opera-accused-of-predatory-loan-apps.html?guccounter=1
People are still using it thanks to them forcing (ig sponsors from yt videos) and appealing to young generations with the opera gx browser and Twitter account mostly.
With the regular browser I assume they got it by accident while downloading adware(this might have happened to gx).