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Do you trust Brave company and their products: Browser, Search, VPN, etc..?
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this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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Privacy
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I don't trust Brave one bit. Its whole approach reeks of a bait-and-switch (think "we won't share or sell your data" pre-9/11 Google). Its founder is a massive homophobe and crypto-bro, and I have a massive learned distrust of homophobes and crypto-bros.
Moreover, I see no reason to use it when we already have far superior options (Firefox).
I agree with this distrust. Something about the browser just feels off to me.
I stick with Firefox for browsing, Ecosia for searching, and Mozilla VPN
Ecosia is the search engine that plants trees! I actually forgot about this one. I've been planning to try it.
Only reason I don't use Ecosia is because you can't search for "Within the past year". Which is really necessary when you're a programmer
I don't generally use that feature, even as a programmer, but I use Google at work just because my privacy is already pretty exposed at work and I'm not looking up anything wild on a corporate network. I also enjoy the targeting in this particular instance because then my search results are developer focused
Oh yes, that's very frustrating. It seems like searching within a date range is sadly non-functional on most search engines at this point.
Programmer for many years, didn't know that feature exists. Not sure I'll use it knowing it exists.
Your mileage may definitely vary haha, I use that feature a lot (I'm lucky / unlucky enough to work with a lot of new technologies)
You should also check out Tab for a Cause as well! A new tab screen that uses ad revenue to donate to charities. You can select your cause and every new tab you open contributes to it
I can get you a referral link the next time I'm on my desktop, it you'd like
I appreciate the sentiment and the offer, but I know that Tab for a Cause does not support Firefox, and I exclusively use Firefox browsers.
However, I do donate directly to several non-profits, and I work for a charitable non-profit myself, so I'll actually mention this to my admins because I don't think we're part of this yet! So thanks!
Thank you for pointing that fact out! It sounds like it was decided by Mozilla about a year ago to institute that change and I hadn't noticed the lack of ads until today. At one point it did have issues, but I was able to get around that by changing some settings. But from the sounds of it that may no longer be possible
Source
That's a shame! I still contribute at work at least, since I use Edge there
I use it sometimes and works fine. Not great, but it's fine for not super specific stuff
I just tried it, and my one concern is that it appears to tailor its results based on locational data, which is a feature I try to avoid. Like you said, I might use it sometimes, but I'm sticking with Startpage and SearXNG instances as my primary search engines for now. I'm adding it to my list though, so I can test it out a bit more. Maybe there's a setting I haven't found yet.
I went to the open streetwise magazine and asked folks if any search engines use open streetmaps by default with searches and they steered me to quant. to boot it otherwise behaves just like duck duck go but does not have the microsoft baggage.
Unfortunately, my experience with qwant does not corroborate this. In spite of promoting themselves as "the search engine that doesn't know anything about you," in reality the use locational data derived from your IP to provide tailored search results. This function is not opt-in, and in fact there is apparently no way to opt out.
I don't think I need to explain why this is deeply problematic in a privacy community, but just in case: Imagine that people in my location tend to have right-wing extremist interests. A search engine could then decide that people in my area are interested in right-wing conspiracies and thus serve me more of this type of result. (This has in fact been the case for me upon first testing a site or app when all it has is my general locational data to serve me algorithmic recommendations, so this is a concrete problem for me.)
On top of this, a search engine that brazenly declares to know nothing about me is in fact using data derived from me to customize results? They have breached my trust from the start.
A search engine should use only search terms, syntax, and data I manually and knowingly provide to produce results. No more than this.
The way I test this is quite simple: Try searching "restaurants in my area." When I do so, it currently provides a list of restaurants in Helsinki, since that is where I'm currently connecting via VPN. When I disconnect my VPN and try again, it gives results for my home town. Any search engine that does this is not one I opt to use.
Gonna give SearXNG a spin then, since even though "I don't have anything to hide talk", privacy is a right we're better off upholding and I want to use services that respect it.
I use this instance: https://searx.tiekoetter.com/
Does any search engine work well for super specific stuff these days? I’m finding search is increasingly useless for my niches (high level topics usually being Carpentry, Building Codes, and Astronomy) but their results usually take me to a word vomit blog, something clearly GPT generated or Pinterest spam (DuckDuckGo is terrible for that)
To be fair, more often than not I find stuff by going into "siloed sites" (yt, forums, etc) and searching from there than using a search engine, but it's still good for stuff that are more common but also more of a hassle trying to remember than just searching it quickly (e.g. "how do I add my user to sudoers again?" kind of stuff)
Would it make sense to use ecosia when you're also using ublock origin? Can they grow trees if you're not viewing any ads?
Not unless you disable your Ad blocker on Ecosia
but then I'll be seeing ads lol
You do it for the trees 🌳
Remember when facebook was a new alternative to myspace that offered privacy and control over who sees your posts? Pepperidge farm remembers.
Enshittification intensifies