If you have the Brave Browser installed on your Windows devices, then you may also have Brave VPN services installed on the machine. Brave installs these services without user consent on Windows devices.
Brave Firewall + VPN is an extra service that Brave users may subscribe to for a monthly fee. Launched in mid-2022, it is a cooperation between Brave Software, maker of Brave Browser, and Guardian, the company that operates the VPN and the firewall solution. The firewall and VPN solution is available for $9.99 per month.
Why is every fucking post in the privacy communities just a circle jerk about Brave?
I know “not everyone who cares about security has anything to hide” but the fact they’re so eager to use the pedophile browser is… concerning.
Marketing
Would you looks at that brave doing something crazy again.
Now we just gotta wait for the CEO to go on a marketing campaign for new users, in an attempt to drown out the story.
Brave, owned by Brendan Eich who has donated to homophobic charities and whose browser promotes a load of crypto bro shit on the new tab page.
Unironically, using straight up Google Chrome is better IMO
Just wait until you find out what search engine they baked into the browser, before you could add or delete your own manually…
Bro missed his crypto scam chance by 6-12mo and just won’t give up.
I tell people to use open source Chromium, Firefox or … Hell, use Vivaldi or something. Brave is a bad time waiting to happen at this point.
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I’ve seen this software behaviour back in the day, oh wait its called trojan.
If you care about privacy at all why are you installing brave
What is the consensus here on using Brave search in Firefox?
It’s giga cringe
I’ve posted a similar question to asklemmy but more over the focus on preference than privacy. In short the search engine Kagi is really good, Brave search was what I had used for a while. I think search engine choice is a case by case kinda thing, each person uses what they like. There are some other engines I forgot from my post which are more privacy centered.
Kagi is a literal scam
Yes it is 10 dollars a month, but you can create an account and try it for free to see if it is for you. It also does not use your data nor push advertisements which explains the cost.
ddg does that for free
$10/mo is also crazy overpriced for a search engine, they’re really not resource intensive at all
ddg relies on Bing so it isn’t really comparable, idk about kagi’s costs but they claim 1.2 cent per search and an average of 700 searches per month (as what they are serving and hence pricing for)
If you mean has a crawler, ddg does crawl and augments with bing. Kagi doesn’t have any crawler.
And yet, Kagi’s search results far surpass both DDG and Bing.
Right now, the only thing preventing them from collecting data is their word. And they don’t exactly have a good reputation for keeping their promises… or putting their money in good places.
The last things I’ve seen with Brave choosing where their money goes has included
- Sponsoring a cryptocurrency gaming event that garnered almost no attention whatsoever
- Their wallet partner Gemini getting sued by New York for $1.1 billion of fraud
The clearly have plenty of money, their software is being developed off the backs of giants (they defer to Google and Jitsi for the bulk of their work) and I don’t think throwing more money at them would be wise
Brave’s VPN is provided by Guardian, a California based corporation. They were recently bought out by DNSFilter, a Washington DC based corporation.
Nothing says “safe and secure” like sending your data through servers owned by a Washington DC company!
I guess if you want to use a different VPN, you still can… But Brave’s #1 choice for you will still take up space on your computer and your browser settings.
Why is a server in Washington DC not safe and secure? I’ll give you private against government snooping it’s not, but it can still be safe and secure.
When the entire point of a VPN is to keep government snooping as far away from your data as possible, a company based in the USA (or any of the “eyes” countries) is generally considered the worst option to go with.
But it isn’t the entire point tho, I use it when connected to public wifi networks to keep my connection secure. Sure, not letting your local ISP spy on you and report it to the gov is one but not the entire point.
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Not always. If someone really wanted to, it’s easy to create aan in the middle attack with something like a VPN. Shouldnt really ever trust public wifi with sensitive info. Can easily be sniffed with a little effort
it’s easy to create aan in the middle attack with something like a VPN
So, like… a Washington DC owned VPN?
Shouldnt really ever trust public wifi with sensitive info. Can easily be sniffed with a little effort
Citation needed, but here’s counter-evidence
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Well, there are 5 governments you should be concidering. Or is it 8? Might be 12 by now…
Well I feel better about making the switch to Firefox now, and doing a custom user.js
That doesn’t really seem that bad. There are issues with brave but that’s not one of them
A VPN provider has the same level of insight into your traffic as an ISP does when not using a VPN. If having one installed without your consent isn’t a privacy issue I don’t know what is…
Is it activated by default though?
I just looked on a VM I spun up for risky shit. It seems to be opt-in only.
Is it a good VPN? No. Is it worth the overreacting that Lemmy seems to do every time someone mentions Brave? No.
But hey, social media.
Apparently we need a anti brave circle jerk
Unclear to me, according to the OP the service is set to manual start. But there is an event trigger attached to the service and the article doesn’t mention what that event is.
Check out thorium.rocks It is a fork of Chromium with performance and security improvement. Chris Titus recommends it.
Stop using his baby boomer ramblings as a source of authentic information. He is just being a redditor on his Titus Tech Talk channel, giving advice on every topic regardless of his expertise on the subject. He is doing good work with debloat script and general Linux peptalk, but put a full stop there. The stuff about web browsers, antiviruses and a bunch of other stuff is complete drivel.
Even better, ditch chromium altogether. There are many performance and privacy focused Firefox forks.
The developer of Thorium has a fork of Firefox called Mercury. Hmmm… Some obviously didn’t check out the website.
Thorium isn’t good at all imo. They don’t really do much to enhance privacy/security, and have constantly delayed updates. It seems to be ran entirely by 1 college kid in his free time.
I like Chris Titus, but I wouldn’t really use him as a source for privacy/security advice.
I like Chris Titus, but I wouldn’t really use him as a source for privacy/security advice.
Someone agrees with me and makes me smile.
I use Vivaldi, Andisearch and Mojeek. I’m going fine with these. As VPN Proton
And spyware for free, and I would not be surprised if they included an insecure backdoor at no extra cost.
As compared to a secure backdoor?
Well, yeah, wouldn’t want the users knowing about it.
Both shitty, yes, but an unsecure backdoor is opening the door to every hacker on the planet, not just one group.
I was disagreeing that a backdoor can ever be secure, because by definition it’s a way to bypass security protocols and if one person can bypass them, there’s no guarantee others can’t too.
Of course, no backdoor is secure, but among them, there are the just plain bad and the even worse.
Wait, Brave, a piece of crypto malware, is acting like crypto malware? Oh no! Roses are red, water is wet and sky is blue too, right?
