[morganvachon]

> I've disliked Brave from the beginning.

As have I. The entire money making scheme behind it, while innovative, is a privacy nightmare.

> Seriously, if you want a browser that gives you control over your data and privacy, use Firefox. It doesn't do any of this shady nonsense.

Agreed, with the caveat that Firefox does have its own, completely different privacy issues[1][2]. Still, it's probably the best choice for a mainstream browser, and there are open source scripts out there[3] to plug up Firefox's few leaks. I used to use (and recommend) Waterfox as a more secure, private alternative to Firefox, but lately Firefox with Shawn's or a similar script applied is just as good. It's generally better to get FF from your operating system's repository and keep it updated that way rather than manually installing a fork.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/shield?as=u&utm_source=...

[2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#health-report

[3] https://github.com/shawnanastasio/firefox-privacy-restorer

[esperent]

Your first link is about Firefox studies.

I had never heard of these before, but when I go to about:studies, I see that I have never participated in any studies, and when I click the link from that page to "Firefox data collection and use" setting, I see that I am opted out from everything. Pretty sure I didn't do that manually.

Your second link is to a page called "Firefox health report". I have no idea what conclusions I'm supposed to draw from that.

Can you provide more info about the privacy violations you're referring to?

[resfirestar]

> when I click the link from that page to "Firefox data collection and use" setting, I see that I am opted out from everything. Pretty sure I didn't do that manually.

Are you on Linux? Many distributions include their own tweaks to the Firefox package, including disabling data collection.

[afiori]

> but when I go to about:studies, I see that I have never participated in any studies

Are you in the US? I also have not participated in any studies but in the preferences it is marked as active. My guess would be that they either run very few of them or are restricted to the US.

[kop316]

I am in the US. It was disabled by default in Debian, but it is on in Windows. It looks like I have not participate din any studies on the Windows machine.

[esperent]

No, Vietnam.

[basch]

>The entire money making scheme behind it, while innovative, is a privacy nightmare.

Is it? An ad bundle is downloaded to your pc. Your pc tracks some usage, and stores every analytic locally. Using the analytics, your local client chooses which ads to target you with. You wipe your local data cache, your analytics disappear. I would guess people wished more advertising respected privacy this way.

This seems like much LESS of a privacy nightmare than Google, Facebook, Verizon, Microsoft, Amazon storing a named profile for each person.

[TedDoesntTalk]

There are many other questionable privacy policies from Firefox. Here's one (mobile):

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1265029

But there are many others, just search "firefox privacy concerns" or similar keywords. Telemetry data -- Pocket suggestions -- etc.

[morganvachon]

You're right, and Pocket being integrated into the browser itself rather than remaining a plugin was the one that drove me to Waterfox a few years ago. I just listed a couple of general issues above for brevity's sake.

[manigandham]

Mozilla owns Pocket. Why wouldn’t they include their own service in the browser?

[morganvachon]

Before they bought Pocket it was a plugin/service that was completely optional. They bought Pocket and integrated it into the browser at a much deeper level, making it opt-out instead of opt-in (and very difficult for the average user to opt out; you have to change several settings in about:config which most users have no idea even exists).

I felt they should have made it an opt-in service that the user can choose on the first launch. Taking away user choice is rarely a good thing, and even less so when dealing with anything privacy related.

[Dylan16807]

Pocket, the service for collecting and syncing articles, is basically a separate thing from pocket suggestions.

The original service was integrated a while ago, but it doesn't really have severe privacy implications. If you click a pocket button, it asks you to log in. If you don't click, it does nothing. This is the one that's hard to disable, but it's an annoyance more than a security problem.

Pocket suggestions are newer, showing articles on the new tab page. They are trivial to turn off, and for what it's worth all the sorting/filtering is done locally.

[morganvachon]

It's the automatic opt-in that concerned me more than anything; any time a company chooses to force a new feature on their users I question the necessity of the action as well as the intent. I had the same issue with automatic opt-in of their telemetry and Studies; I never asked for that and I don't expect it from a company that touts their stance on privacy as a reason to use their software.

My point being, even if Pocket is 100% benign and never leaks any user data, the user should still have a say in whether it is turned on by default on a fresh installation. Anything less is user-hostile, a descriptor Mozilla should avoid if possible.