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Comment by lelf | Hacker News Reader

And just about the first thing you see when trying to install it…

Vivaldi may collect visitor statistics. The visitor statistics may include information about the visitors IP-addresses, usage patterns, <…>

I guess I don't want your shiny new browser.

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At least it's one of the first things you see!

But for "advanced" users this is a turnoff. I wonder what they are getting paid per-user, and if that amount is greater than what they'd make if they just charged for the app.

Every website collects that stuff.

Most websites don't collect that stuff across every other website.

Most don't. A surprising amount do - any page that embeds a Facebook 'like' button loaded from Facebook servers with a referrer header ... or JQuery hosted by Google or a Doubleclick advert or a reTweet button, and on and on.

Strictly: that's not "most websites", it's "many services".

Facebook "likes", Google analytics, New Relic monitoring, and any of numerous other tools can do this.

Which is why I'm loaded for bear with noscript, adblock, Privacy Badger, Ghostery, and numerous entries in my /etc/hosts file for particularly noxious / ubiquitous sites.

This is why I stay logged out of facebook and don't allow third party cookies. Trying to move off of gmail also so I am not always logged in there either. Probably not perfect but hopefully it foils a lot of attempts at tracking.

Install AdBlock, Disconnect, uninstall Flash and Java, and use a JavaScript blocker and you'll make a good dent in a website's ability to track you.

And make a good dent in your ability to browse websites.

Are you speaking from experience or out of thin air? Because that is not my experience.

I block all scripts globally, flash heavy sites do not load and I consider that a 'feature'. Frankly, surfing the web without NoScript & AdBlock is an experience I do not want and have learned to do without. IF I need drivers or need access or ecommerce I'll allow the main site to run temporarily in Sandboxie or use tools/alt approaches to get the data without 7 or 8 ad servers running. The false promise of the internet is easily eschewed when you take a pragmatic approach to it.

Also: I was looking for something on mainstream retailer sites and was amazed at the list of servers. How many TargetImg servers does it take to load a product page? Answer: At least four, plus all the other tracking/ad loading detritus. Just wow.

You re-enable JS on the sites that you visit often and I've never had an issue.

Oh, well, missed that. That's what I get for replying to an out of context snippet.

It's perfectly reasonable to expect extra data to be collected when using prerelease versions of software. Complaining about it now is premature.

That's not a tradeoff I'm comfortable with, "even" in pre-release software.

I'm not accusing you of this, but in other cases I've seen proponents of something say "This isn't a big deal, it's just starting out". Then, when people continue to complain a year from now, the defenders say "This isn't a big deal, it's always done this."

Vivaldi looks interesting, but I'd wager that there's a decent overlap between the Power Users they're after, and the group that values their privacy the most.

Privacy has nothing to do with it. If the software is not yet ready, users are expected to encounter serious bugs. Your QA department is paid to help provide you with information to diagnose and troubleshoot those bugs, but users aren't, so you need to collect that automatically.

If they explicitly say they will stop in the release version, I would accept that argument. If not...

> It's perfectly reasonable to expect extra data to be collected when using prerelease versions of software.

This is incorrect in the world I live in, and I do not want to visit a world where it is correct.

You're in the wrong world then, buddy. If the software is not yet ready, users are expected to encounter serious bugs. Your QA department is paid to help provide you with information to diagnose and troubleshoot those bugs, but users aren't, so you need to collect that automatically.

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