This. If I’m required to give up all my personal info I might as well get some cash back and all the other CC benefits.

in my opinion the less people have your information the better.

Yeah that’s kinda the point…

You could make the same argument for cash.

Not really. At the time cash was created it was simply for exchanging value, because we didn’t have anything better. It’s just legacy currency now.

No shortage of different ways but most of them require KYC which basically instantly makes it in useless. You can, however, buy from individuals using LocalMonero.

The government is selling your financial data, which is a whole other level of fucked up since thats not something you can opt out of, at all.

Information is not property unless you create it

I’m genuinely interested in your interpretation of how your personal information can be considered “intellectual property” of a data broker.

No but it does have telemetry.

And the only proof we have that he doesn’t collect data on Brave’s users is the questionable word of the devs.

And…the source code?

Literally any Firefox fork is a suitable alternative that can be daily driven

That’s simply incorrect. I’ve used a few and many of them don’t load webpages properly. We can argue about who’s to blame for that but at the end of the day they don’t work the way any Chromium browsers would.

Most people recommend forks of Firefox

Not around here they don’t.

Using a fork of Chromium is still using Chromium

That’s not correct. Chromium is an entirely different browser. It has a logo that looks like the Chrome logo but gray.

and still helping Google’s dominance in the browser market

When there becomes a suitable alternative that I can use for daily tasks and still preserves privacy, I’ll recommend that one.

Currently I use 1 of 5 different browsers, depending on the task. I can’t really recommend other people do the same. So the one is typically recommend is Brave because it’s the only out-of-the-box privacy-preserving browser that works with virtually any webpage.

There’s really not a difference. At the end of the day you need a browser so a reason not to use one is not terribly different from a reason TO use another. And the one that constantly gets recommended in these communities is Firefox, which is not as bad as Chrome but still worse than just about any privacy-preserving browser out there.

It still uses chromium

I’m not sure what that means. It doesn’t “use Chromium”, it is a fork of Chromium.

it’s susceptible to the Google’s Web integrity protocols

No. It isn’t. You’re thinking of Chrome. Don’t know how many times I can say this but Chromium forks are not Chrome.

An website using the new protocols can refuse to load on your browser if you don’t accept the ads.

…huh?

Why is it so difficult to comprehend?

Because it makes zero sense.

Yet, they use Brave. Chrome

FTFY

Just disable the ads, crypto and telemetry and suddenly none of those things are a problem anymore, just like Firefox.

Firefox is actually NOT a private browser. I don’t know where it gets this reputation because clearly those people haven’t read their privacy policy where it plainly states that they gather and sell your info to a data mining company.

For better or worse, Chromium browsers work better because the vast majority of people use Chromium so that’s how people build their sites.

Brave has tons of privacy features and settings. Including built-in ad-blocking just like uBlock so your extensions can’t be used to fingerprint you.

If you want a private browser and insist on but using Chromium there are dozens of Firefox forks that are much better for privacy.

If the (supposedly) privacy preserving ads and crypto really upset you, you can simply turn them off.

Stock for stock, yes.

The difference is iOS is iOS, and there is only one. Whereas Android is open source and comes in thousands of flavors. You cannot install another OS on your Apple devices. You get what Apple gives you, and nothing more or different because that’s the way they like it. They want control over your devices.

Some flavors of Android are Graphene or Calyx OS which are not only better and more usable than iOS but also 10x more secure and private.

Every website these days will just hijack any link posted on their service and there’s not a whole lot you can do other than just physically typing in the intended address character by character. No one wants to do that. No one cares. And these platforms know that. That’s why they do it 🖕

Do people really just have bare PCBs all over their house?

Not really. Different websites will treat you differently depending on what country you’re accessing them from.

I mean there’s no shortage of possibilities

So encryption is dead in the UK?

Do they not realize there are messaging services that don’t even have a central server or even an entity responsible?

Or companies that don’t even have a presence in the UK, and thus no responsibility to comply with their laws?

Pedos will just download and install something like Keet or Signal or Session while the privacy and security of law-abiding citizens are irrevocably compromised…

And yet they’ve never fixed the size, added a number row or a second layer for punctuation…

Because it lacks many of the tools, features, and finish of more popular ones like WhatsApp, Telegram, and even IG.

I really appreciate that I can buy first-party hardware from Valve and then install and run GoG games on it without any BS barriers or workarounds.

I got some GoG games on sale yesterday. Installed Heroic Games Launcher. Logged in. Installed the games. Clicked “add to Steam library” and boom, there they are in the Steam launcher alongside my other Steam games.

This is just such a breath of fresh air in a modern world consumed by proprietary bullshit. Valve is the anti-Nintendo.

What data is available is not so important to me as what data could be used against me in a court of law.

Bit of a moot point regardless as there are plenty of private messengers.

I don’t know but you can only place calls to other WhatsApp users, to my knowledge

I love SimpleX because you can have multiple users and you can use 1-time invite codes so you don’t actually have to give anyone an identifier of any kind if you don’t want to.

The EU is supposed to pass some laws to make iMessage accessible from other devices

I was the biggest social media addict

I was, a long time ago. Back when you actually used it to follow your friends and see what they were up to. Meta fixed that right up for me when they enshittified it with rampant ads, “Reels” and “suggestions”, not to mention cloning literally every other social media feature, to the point that I can’t even find my actual friends anymore.

I have several people that I have blocked because they continuously send me Reels, despite me never replying to a single message and asking them to stop sending them.

Dude iPhone keyboard are fucking horrific.

I mean that’s one very specific scenario. Also you wouldn’t be able to call any of those places on WhatsApp or IG Messenger.

I mean if you don’t care about privacy at all Signal does kinda suck in comparison to other popular chat apps.

Same. I use it to chat with my parents exclusively, who are 68 and 75.

Dont use facebook

Doesn’t really matter if you use it or not.

Meta applies a myriad of advanced and complicated tracking methods. Email is a very popular and easy one. I believe the one you’re referring to is called a tracking pixel.

For example, some browsers block tracking Pixels, but if you’re logged into Amazon with an email address that Meta knows, they will sell your shopping habits to Meta to show you ads.

Interest rates have motivated corporations to find creative ways to maintain profits. God forbid they just make less money for a while.

Have to have some kind of hardware to run that software on. And that hardware needs proprietary drivers.

Hardware is ridiculously expensive to develop and manufacture so don’t count on any competition that isn’t already doing it.