I’m just using the default GrapheneOS SMS app, but it’s concerning seeing the number of these FOSS apps lately adding major privacy invasive permission changes. Are there a few big companies buying them up for a quick buck, or what?

This is exactly why I use Proton as well. I’m not worried about law enforcement, I just want Google and other big tech’s tentacles out of my fucking business. I don’t want to be advertised to.

Australia too. I’ll never understand it, and I live here.

Yeah, TOR in particular seems to give a lot of people a false sense of security. I live out in a very remote area, I’m certainly not going to be using TOR, for obvious reasons.

It’s very telling when the only criticism you really see leveled against Brave is that same article everybody posts as some kind of trap card, despite the fact it can be boiled down to “don’t use Brave because the CEO is a bigot or something, and you have to opt out if their crypto stuff.” Cool. I don’t care about those things, I care about the browser’s ability to do what I need it to, and Brave does. Are you putting your trust in a company that could be selling your data? Sure, that’s always a risk, but until it’s been confirmed, I’m happy to stick with it. I mean shit, it even beats out GrapheneOS’s Vanadium in the fingerprinting test, and that’s the browser I use on my phone.

imo, the hate against Brave is unfounded and seems to be coming from the anti-Chromium crowd. There are valid arguments to be made against it, but I honestly couldn’t give less of a fuck what their CEO believes as long as the product works as advertised, and Brave consistently scores highly in privacy and security tests.

If this passes, the rest of the world will follow. This CANNOT be allowed to happen.

Fascism, authoritarianism, totalitarian dystopian thinking, it’s all the same to me when it comes to the State overstepping and blatantly looking to pass laws that remove the right to privacy and autonomy from citizens. I’m no leftist ideologue, I skew libertarian right (although I couldn’t describe all the nuance of my views within the context of a simple label), but if there’s one thing we have in common, it’s our hatred of government overreach and corporate control of the masses.

Fuck authoritarianism. Fuck collectivist bullshit. Never stand for the trampling of your rights.

What fucking fascists.

I never had any real issues with speed using Surfshark, the reason I made the switch was largely about trust. As another user said, as soon as I saw Surfshark start their YouTube advertising spree, and start to bloat their client with unnecessary features, I started looking for alternatives.

I’m iffy about any VPN company that uses YouTuber marketing as it is, and while my threat model isn’t overly paranoid, I believe the VPN company someone chooses to use should have paranoid business practices. After I saw the news on Mullvad’s raid, the authorities subsequently finding nothing, and the fact that a user’s account is merely a string of numbers, I decided it was the VPN for me.

It’s a good day to be a Mullvad user. Switched over from Surfshark a while ago, and I love it.