Alternatively they could decompile it

The CEO has shitty stances on certain things but everything is basically a frontend to Google/Bing/Brave which are all also shitty so the entire search engine market is fucked from an ethical perspective

Kagi isn’t privacy focused but it doesn’t use your data for ads either. The main benefit is good search quality and more control over the search results.

Mailbox.org works with IMAP so you can use a regular email program. The mailbox is not encrypted by default but I saw that there’s an option to enable it involving PGP keys.

For my ebike I use OSMAnd with Brouter

It works on my phone, I’ve been using it for years. I’m currently using it off of Obtainium though.

The Cromite devs said they use ABP instead of uBO because it’s in C++ instead of JavaScript so they can easily implement it, it also has patches to remove some of the weirder stuff

Last I checked they seemed to give up on decentralization as well

My guess is that it’s a neo-Nazi thing, so his promoting right-wing American politics (his largest userbase) is probably intentional and not just him being stupid

Considering how he runs a business whose goal is to capture the privacy crowd and how a large portion of the privacy crowd is made up of those “Libertarian” tech-bro types, it might be more than just “no clue about American politics”, especially since he’s also doing stuff like promoting Bitcoin through Proton Wallet which is also popular among “Libertarian” tech-bro types, and the article used for marketing that both-sidesed the problems the “left” vs “right” experience and equated the Democrats with the “left”, which is popular among “Libertarian” tech-bro types as well. The 88 in his Reddit username is also suspect regardless of him claiming that it’s there because it’s his birth year. People who know how to operate a business usually aren’t doing it out of stupidity, so I’m not going to give him the benefit of the doubt on this, especially since the entire platform depends on trusting that they aren’t doing anything shady.

the comments in that thread is such a reddit moment

I don’t value privacy for the sake of privacy, I value it because it’s useful for defending against capitalists and fascists who want an unequal society that commits genocides and incarcerates people for immutable characteristics. Fascists don’t value privacy for the sake of privacy either, for them it’s a tool to further their goals of creating the worst society possible. It comes down to a left vs right issue, I picked one side, and Proton picked to promote the other.

I’m not sure how Brave is significantly better for fingerprinting than Cromite other than being more popular, which it still isn’t popular anyways and both of them can be bypassed with more advanced scripts. Vanadium is the most secure, being part of the GrapheneOS project, but all of the Chromium-based Android browsers have better security than FF-based currently, although I just saw somewhere that IronFox is enabling process isolation which is currently experimental.

For me the main use case for LibreWolf isn’t so much being anonymous as it is wanting a browser that doesn’t have ads and data mining stuff going on and has some additional privacy protections but that also doesn’t get in the way too much in terms of usability. Zen Browser might be a better fit for this use case now since it improves the UI while claiming to not have telemetry, but I haven’t tried it yet. I’m not really concerned about fingerprinting since most sites I use already know who I am since I’m logged into them. If I wanted to be really private though I’d use Tor or Mullvad, but not as a daily driver since I value UX more as long as it’s not invasive.

There’s Vanadium and Cromite which have ad-blocking and strong security and none of the problems Brave has barring Chromium monopoly

On default settings, Firefox’s news feed is suspiciously similar to the stuff I browse, so I don’t trust it at all for privacy without Arkenfox. I like how LibreWolf strips all of that out by default but still lets me loosen the settings so I can install add-ons and keep data I want stored, which I’m not sure that Mullvad browser does. If it’s getting behind on updates though, that would be disappointing, although right now the LW Flatpak is on a newer version of FF than Fedora FF. Mullvad browser is better for anonymity though.

we are all fighting for the same cause

Catering to the “Libertarian” neo-Nazi crowd so they buy your product vs wanting to defend minorities against these sort of people is not the same cause

Nowadays I would recommend Zen Browser + uBO over Brave which has a nice user-friendly UI and supposedly disables telemetry. Before Zen Browser, disabling the crap Brave comes with takes a similar amount of effort as tweaking Librewolf’s aggressive privacy settings, but one of them is actually privacy focused and the other is run by a shady ad crypto company with a shady news feed that keeps pushing Fox News and a homophobic CEO. For mobile there’s Cromite.

OpenAI was also a non-profit until a few months ago

At least GrapheneOS isn’t something I’d pay for