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Comment by turblety | Hacker News Reader

Just a PSA, that you really shouldn't be using Vivaldi or any closed source browser. As we know, companies that start off privacy/ethically focused (take Mozilla for example) eventually turn evil and start spying/tracking their users.

Vivaldi will eventually start doing this, and you'll have absolutely no idea because it's entirely closed source. No one knows what mischief they get up to.

TL;DR; Don't sign into your bank with Vivaldi

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>take Mozilla for example

I thought Firefox was open source?

That's not it, Mozilla decided to leave the fediverse and has been loading Firefox with AI and opt-out tracking features. All while still being funded by Big G.

> Mozilla decided to leave the fediverse

did they? their mastodon instance at mozilla.social still seems to exist.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41572137

They recently announced that it'll be shutting down.

https://mozilla.social/@mozilla/113153943609185249

I'm assuming they left the fediverse because it ended up not being a huge success, and not because they suddenly pivoted against decentralization.

That’s right, the hill to die on is the browser’s openness.

Not your OS, not your firmware. Not your hardware. It’s the browser

Thanks for raising closed hardware too, and I presume you are talking about the Intel ME (backdoor spyware [1] that Intel puts into all their chips via their closed source proprietary firmware). It's a complete blackbox, other CPU that no one knows entirely what it does, but has full access to your main CPU/memory/computer, and allows it to be remotely controlled by anyone with Intels signing keys.

We need to open this too, or at least be transparent, and your points on closed firmware/hardware is really important.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine

Intel ME is disabled and neutralized on my Librem 15.

You can never truly be sure as it's can't be entirely removed. There has to be a little bit remaining, just the first few modules or the machine will shut down after 30 minutes, but the Librem 15 is a beautiful machine and Puri.sm are really awesome.

It's a hill, I don't think anyone said it's the hill.

'Try to detect benefit cheats.'

Or wait till the 1st one surrounded a mountain successful at a hight of 3,5km

;-)

As a cat of nine lives, there are many hills I intend to die on

whataboutism is a logical fallacy.

Since you are also mentioning Mozilla, what browser would you recommend instead?

Brave is solid. Opensource with some nice features

Such as web3/cypto/bullshit

Which are Opt-In. It doesn't hurt to have optional features for people who want them.

mozilla is spying/tracking users now?

Yup [1]. They've basically left their core mission and just sell out now.

1. https://noyb.eu/en/firefox-tracks-you-privacy-preserving-fea...

Things are more complex than that. Yes, they're engaged in creating an ads measurement technique that is actually very private (read the specs). No, they're not making money out of it. Yes, they've done a terrible job at explaining that to users.

Giving non-zero bits of information to advertisers is the opposite of private. They won’t stop using other methods of tracking, they’ll just use these bits as a part of your fingerprint.

AFAIK it gives advertisers aggregated data on the performance of the ads, such as "23% of the clicks on the ad end up buying the product". I would be enlightened to hear how this can be used as part of my fingerprint.

The absolute best case is that it doesn’t actually help advertisers track users, so it’s net-zero to users: advertisers will still track us through other means, but at least Firefox doesn’t help them do it. If any part of the process leaks non-zero bits of information, it’s actively detrimental to privacy; otherwise it’s just not helpful to anyone other than advertisers.

This also involves trust. The party doing aggregation has access to non-aggregated information and is able to sell it. As far as I understand, currently this party is ISRG, which has reasonably good reputation and probably won’t sell it. I don’t trust Mozilla to not silently add other aggregation providers though, as they did with this option itself. I’m also not sure that this data doesn’t pass through Mozilla servers, and I very much don’t trust Mozilla with it.

To summarize my thoughts,

1. There’s no evidence that “PPA” improves privacy in any way;

2. You have to trust centralized third parties doing the aggregation, and the full set of parties you need to trust is not completely clear;

3. The only party who obviously benefits from “PPA” is advertisers, which tracks with the fact that the protocol was designed with heavy involvement from Facebook: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KpdSKD8-Rn0bWPTu4UtK54ks...;

4. So it’s at best neutral for users and at worst is actively detrimental.

Except, there's the possibility that if this worked, companies wouldn't need to track users, and considering the hassle it is (at least in the EU), they will prefer using these non-invasive methods _instead_.

And this possibility seems to be why Mozilla engages in it. You might think it's not going to work, but from this to attributing malice to Mozilla's intention there's a long way.

> there's the possibility that if this worked, companies wouldn't need to track users

I don’t buy it. “PPA” don’t allow for targeted ads, so it does not functionally replace tracking. It’s an additional statistical tool made for advertisers and designed by advertisers.

> from this to attributing malice to Mozilla's intention there's a long way

Silently sending (non-aggregated, aggregation happens later) user data to third-party servers is enough to attribute malice.

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