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Comment by KMnO4 | Hacker News Reader

> Arc is built from the ground up to be private and secure. We don’t know what sites you visit or what you search for.

Immediately following this is a form for me to enter my email address so I can receive a download link. Sorry Arc, that’s not a trade I’m willing to make.

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view-source shows the actual dmg URL: https://releases.arc.net/release/Arc-latest.dmg -> https://arc.net/release/Arc-latest.dmg -> https://releases.arc.net/release/Arc-1.0.1-40233.dmg

weird, I just clicked on a download link and downloaded the browser; they never asked for my email

EDIT: ah ok, they ask for an account after you have downloaded 300MB of junk.

Binaries aren't available for Windows. They show a "Join Windows waitlist" button that leads to an Email form.

I think they show different buttons depending on your platform. If you visit from a mobile browser, it shows a "Get download link" button which asks for your email.

They presumably do this so that people can download it later from desktop using the emailed link. It's easy to mistake it as an attempt to harvest email IDs. The website could definitely use some text which indicates that it's Mac only at the moment.

Yeah their messaging is a bit strange. Perhaps someone with more info on Arc can clarify, but their landing page makes a strong point about them being privacy-conscious, and their summary of their own terms of service is "TLDR: we won't spy on you", but at the same time you must log in to use the browser. What is their monetization strategy? If something is VC-backed and free, it's hard to believe that they aren't ad supported in some way, which almost always relies on some amount of tracking.

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