Comment by idreyn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by idreyn | Hacker News Reader

> Oh, and we don't sell your data

> Wondering why browsers are usually free?

There's a heavy implication here that most browser vendors sell your browsing data, but you don't state it outright because (aside from Chrome, arguably) I don't think it's actually true. Let's look at the others:

- Edge is probably sending all kinds of invasive telemetry to Microsoft

- Firefox is maybe(?) sending your email address to Pocket if you have an account with them

- Safari is a product that you pay through the nose for

None of these things are the same thing as selling data the browser collects. If you have any evidence that this is happening, you should put it on your website, because I'd love to hear about it! If you don't, you should probably not prey on people's deep confusion about who is tracking them on the web, and how.

Let's not shift established expectations away from the idea that there ought to be a browser that's both free to use and free of spyware when we already have such a browser in Firefox.

> Edge is probably sending all kinds of invasive telemetry to Microsoft

I think there's a useful distinction between product analytics, which might include basic details about web usage but likely in a privacy preserving way, and actual web history.

All of the browsers, Sigma OS included, are going to do product analytics. But I'm not sure that any are going to actually track web history. They'll track what web features you're using, and Chrome is known to track domains but I believe in a statistical way that doesn't give perfect info on who's using what. They all sync some state if you sign in, but that's a feature not analytics, if you trust them, and Sigma is no different here.

Apart from browsers like Brave selling ad space or dodgy Android browsers selling full web history, I'm not sure that any of the major players are actually doing anything fundamentally different to what Sigma is here. Firefox and Safari push the privacy side a little harder in their own ways, but are still roughly equivalent I think.

Totally. I don't think Google is necessarily doing anything as blatant as directly selling your browsing history to third parties.

Since I went to go check, I might as well share what I found: in my Google account "Activity controls" there is a toggle (off for me, not sure what the default is) that grants them permission to use Chrome history for "faster searches, better recommendations, and more personalized experiences". As I understand it, this is not selling away your data so much as letting them use it to auction your attention to advertisers.

Yeah exactly. Third parties can bid on keywords as they have always been able to do, and Google might give you better ads based on that data, but they aren't telling the third party why. That's a pretty big difference!

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