this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Privacy

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Video related.

There. Is. Not. A. Single. Browser. That. Values. Your. Privacy.

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[–] [email protected] 60 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Is it just me or is this video stupid af? You can easily disable all of the telemetry in Firefox. Like yea, no shit if you keep recommendations on, it'll collect data for that. How else would it recomend shit to you? Am i missing something here?

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I was hopeful that there would be less of these shitposts. I expect this bullshit on Reddit but I had higher hopes for Lemmy. I guess I'm naive.

[–] deweydecibel 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean, yeah, what did you expect? People make shitposts, no matter what the name of the website is

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I just assumed there would be LESS shitposts, lol. But clearly that was wrong.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Enrage to Engage with a side order of Cunningham's Law. Whether or not the content has merit, you'll hook a bunch of folks eager to argue about it in the comments and get a hit of that sweet sweet engagement.

[–] deweydecibel 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Also, Mozilla is non-profit. They run on fumes because of it. As long as everything is disable-able, and it is, I'm happy to let them make some money so they can keep going. We need Firefox.

It's infuriating that this video calls out Mozilla's declaration that they respect user privacy, as if this contradicts that.

Respect is giving users options to do whatever they like and respecting their choices. Firefox does all of that. It respects you as the user and trusts you to control your own privacy by providing you the tools to do so.

Modern day software design emphasizes removing user choices so they're easier to corral. Firefox will straight up let you break it if you want. It lets spinoffs like Fennec exist. That is user respect.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yea. We really do need them. Like no browser is gonna make you 100% (or close to 100%) anonymous unless you use TOR (correctly). Even then idk. TOR is above my knowledge-base so I stick with firefox. It's really the best you're gonna get for reasonable privacy control. Of course I hardened it a bit and added a few extensions.

[–] Rooki 7 points 1 year ago

My favourite part is.... the context the data is collected. Its collected during you search or interact with firefox addons or Firefox sync.

[–] deweydecibel 36 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

There. Is. Not. A. Single. Browser. That. Values. Your. Privacy.

Then get off the internet, I guess? I mean, are you expecting one to come along at some point? Are you going to pay for it?

Mozilla is a non profit, which puts them leagues ahead of all competition in terms of trustworthiness. They have minor telemetry and sponsored things that can all be disabled, and that's entirely because they need to make some money somehow. No one donates, so what do you expect them to do?

They respect your privacy by giving you the option to disable everything. That is far more respect than you will ever get from any of the chromium browsers.

[–] lambda 36 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

There. Is. Not. A. Single. Browser. That. Values. Your. Privacy.

Librewolf, Hardened Firefox, ungoogled-chromium

[–] Rooki 7 points 1 year ago

librewolf is hardened firefox AND ungoogled XD

[–] deweydecibel 2 points 1 year ago

The first two of which are just Firefox...they're not browsers in their own right, and they only continue to exist because Mozilla and Firefox continue to exist.

And Mozilla and Firefox continue to exist because they make money off of the completely optional things that this video is raving about.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/_JNg4Ox2Hvc?t=512

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Choosing a browser has been picking between terrible choices for a long time now. It's a shame.

[–] deweydecibel 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Both sides are absolutely not the same, here. Drawing a false comparison between Firefox and Chromium because Firefox has some suggested content is an hysterically ridiculous take.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

suggested content you can turn off if you don't want it.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Important to note there are options.

I've been relatively pleased with the duckduckgo mobile browser. There are a reasonable amount of chromium forks that aim for privacy oriented browsing as well, although I don't have a specific one to endorse.

I guess in defense of Mozilla: it isn't really playing a different game in the browser space, they're just trying to mitigate some of the toxicity of ad revenue as a foundation. They're still a non profit hiring from the same pool as the tech industry money printing machine.

There's still a limited pool of support they have to pull from, and I like it better with them around so the big 3 don't have a total monopoly on browser architecture.

That said it's maybe the best example the model is flawed at the jump.

[–] bappity 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

the DuckDuckGo mobile browser is brilliant, wish it had add-ons like Firefox though. the mobile Firefox browser right now seems to keep becoming more unstable over time :/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

which sends data back to MS, but sure.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It'll get more support with some time. For now it's a nice browser to keep separate for not polluting what you doing mind putting out in public. I've had a lot more smooth experiences with PWAs I load through the ddg browser.

Actually one area I think it's got an immediate edge on firefox while the wild wild fediverse sorts out is just how many fewer attack vectors it's presenting with the pared back features.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Mhm... bold statement from a YouTuber that uses YouTube, Google and fricking Windows 11.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

He talks about Mozilla's official terms of their user's privacy. Doesn't matter what OS, search engine and video platform he uses.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It matters a great deal given the hypocrisy.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Switching to Linux or something won't change how Mozilla handles its user's privacy. But whatever.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

All of these are about sponsored content. AFAIK in the current model of sponsored content have to inlude some tracking as they need to keep track of how many click goes through, and charge their client according to that.

I kind of wish there would be non-tracking based ads, like burned in mid-roll ads on youtube: Just give a shout out and collect money. But it is pertty hard to convince others to switch to that model without solid data.

Finally, everything they mentioned are sponsored content and pocket, both can be turned off with one click. I call that a win in the distopian modern internet. And obviously there are more privacy oriented fork that strips these tracking content by default.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Just use Lynx.

[–] error505 3 points 1 year ago

I have used bromite for ages it's a custom chromium fork but is no longer maintained.

One of the Devs forked it and now I use his version.

https://github.com/uazo/bromite-buildtools

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I knew that before but there's something you can do about it. At least I hope it helps.

In about:config find and set the following options:
extensions.pocket.enabled = false
toolkit.coverage.endpoint.base = "" (empty string)
toolkit.coverage.opt-out = true
toolkit.telemetry.coverage.opt-out = true
browser.region.update.enabled = false
browser.region.network.url = "" (empty string)

Block the following domains in Pi-hole, AGH, NextDNS or of you don't use any of that then in you hosts file:
spocs.getpocket.com
location.services.mozilla.com
contile.services.mozilla.com
getpocket.cdn.mozilla.net

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Use IceCat browser plus do some about:config changes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Shout-out to my favorite browser Vivaldi

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Orion, based on WebKit, for iOS and macOS looks interesting. Supports chrome and Firefox add ons. I would like it to get a little more refined, still early days. Looks very promising

[–] spacedancer 1 points 1 year ago

Interesting, thanks for the suggestion. I'll test it out.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Why not Safari, if you are on those two?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

On Android I highly recommend Privacy Browser. It's on Fdroid: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.stoutner.privacybrowser.standard/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Can't actually load video on invidious , comments seem to talk about (telemetry|sponsors)

For this very reason i always turn airplane mode on when (install|updat)ing firefox

To peops justifying Mozilla doing this : did all you remember when they shoved mr robot ad and ad advertising their VPN in the browser for no reason ? There's ways to disable them that's true , but they're gonna continue doing this . Don't like when peops who aren't tech oriented are left vulnerable to this

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

This is easily disabled and there's FF forks that remove that stuff entirely if you're that paranoid about it. Really stupid clickbait bs.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Mullvad-browser does!

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