Another vote for fairphone here, but for reasons others failed to mention: replaceable battery, so even after 2 years, it can feel like new and keep most of its value (to resell if wanted); 5 years of updates + warranty; support for after market roms. Then there’s also the fair ethics part of it
Not killing, but degrades in performance because batteries have a limited amount of charge cycles. The more intensive you use your phone, the faster the battery degrades
You don’t want a randomised fingerprint, as that is relatively unique among a sea of fingerprints [1]. What you want is a fingerprint that’s as similar to everyone else (generic) as possible; that’s what Firefox’s resist fingerprinting setting aims to do, and what the Tor browser does.
[1] There are many values you can’t change, so the randomisation of the ones you can change could end up making you more unique … think of it like having your language set to french but are based in the USA — that language setting can’t uniquely identify the French in france, but will stick out like a sore thumb if set in shitsville Idaho. It’s likely the same if you use firefox but have your user agent set to chrome; that’s more rare and unique than not changing the user agent at all.
No, that’s absolutely incorrect. You want a new fake fingerprint every single time someone asks your browser for your information. You want it to lie about your plugins, user agent, your fonts and your screen size. Bonus if you use common values, but not necessary.
The randomized data they’re providing isn’t static and it isn’t the same from session to session.
100% White noise is a far better obfuscation than a 40% non-unique tracking ID. Yes, your data is lumped in with 47 million other users, but used in conjunction with static pieces of your data you become uncomfortably identifiable.
Yeah… I don’t know why a bunch of privacy bros think they know better than the CS and cryptography PhD’s of the Tor project; the most advanced and complex privacy and anonymity preserving project in computing history.
But isn’t randomization supposed to give you a different unique fingerprint each time? So yes, you would be unique and easily tracked but only until your fingerprint changes
That was addressed above, you ever see “identical” twins? They look exactly the same if you see then once, twice, 3 times, but if you see both of them constantly, you’ll start seeing the small difference in them and then be able to identify who’s who. Same exact thing.
I don’t think there is any proven results, but I think the reason the EFF prefers Braves decision is the philosophy that there are so many data points that it could be possible to link you to it using the ones not standardized by anti fingerprinting.
Like ways to incorrectly describe someone. One describes a guy correctly but generically. One describes a guy with a lot of detail but the wrong race and two feet too short.
This can be an effective method for breaking persistence, but it is important to note that a tracker may be able to determine that a randomization tool is being used, which can itself be a fingerprinting characteristic. Careful thought has to go into how randomizing fingerprinting characteristics will or will not be effective in combating trackers.
In practice, the most realistic protection currently available is the Tor Browser, which has put a lot of effort into reducing browser fingerprintability. For day-to-day use, the best options are to run tools like Privacy Badger or Disconnect that will block some (but unfortunately not all) of the domains that try to perform fingerprinting, and/or to use a tool like NoScript( for Firefox), which greatly reduces the amount of data available to fingerprinters.
So the EFF seem to recommend generic over randomisation…
Maybe ask yourself why the Tor project decided against randomisation?
This says it only detects chrome extensions, so I am not surprised it doesn’t detect your Firefox extensions. Why do you say that Firefox won’t leak extensions at all? Do you have a source for that?
The way it’s written doesn’t say whether it simply isn’t made to work for Firefox or whether it couldn’t be made to work for Firefox. Fortunately, the latter appears to be the case.
Detecting extensions using web accessible resources is not possible on Firefox as Firefox extension ID’s are unique for every browser instance. Therefore the URL of the extension resources cannot be known by third parties.
and also for Chrome:
in manifest v3 extensions will be able to enable ‘use_dynamic_url’ option, which will change the resource URL for each session (browser restart). This will render this detection method unusable.
Though it should be noted that this method isn’t the only way to detect extensions.
But there is no easy way to detect all extensions, instead most popular ones
It doesn’t really matter if its easy or hard, I’m sure Google already has automated processes in-place to detect all extensions published to the store and fingerprint browsers. They might even have the same for Firefox extensions, who knows.
Brave plus privacy badger seems to be the strongest anti-fingerprint that you can lay your hands on at the moment.
I have waded waist deep through about 15 anti-Brave posts where people have told me to try different combinations of plugins and browsers. Somebody claimed duckduckgo would do it, but once I installed it and found out it didn’t support plugins, I walked away immediately.
Everybody seems to direct most of their hate toward the CEO and the crypto. As far as I’m concerned those two things don’t bother me anywhere near as much as their thirst for funding. I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have any qualms about selling 100% of my data off to anyone willing to pay to stay afloat. But in the end that’s probably not all that different from Microsoft or Google.
Brave is keeping up with the Joneses for YouTube ad blocking. It’s reasonably quick and supports all of my Chrome plugins.
I absolutely cannot get Firefox to pass the fingerprint test. If I could convince Firefox to pass that test I would strongly consider backing off my usage of brave.
It's very telling when the only criticism you really see leveled against Brave is that same article everybody posts as some kind of trap card, despite the fact it can be boiled down to "don't use Brave because the CEO is a bigot or something, and you have to opt out of their crypto stuff." Cool. I don't care about those things, I care about the browser's ability to do what I need it to, and Brave does. Are you putting your trust in a company that could be selling your data? Sure, that's always a risk, but until it's been confirmed, I'm happy to stick with it. I mean shit, it even beats out GrapheneOS's Vanadium in the fingerprinting test, and that's the browser I use on my phone.
imo, the hate against Brave is unfounded and seems to be coming from the anti-Chromium crowd. There are valid arguments to be made against it, but I honestly couldn't give less of a fuck what their CEO believes as long as the product works as advertised, and Brave consistently scores highly in privacy and security tests.
Brave has been thoroughly tested from many privacy advocate organizations EFF and more known names using default settings and ranks as the highest overall rated fingerprint resistant and anti tracking protected browser, again at default settings I have ran many tests once configured and get even better results even against librewolf with and without extensions and vanilla Firefox with privacy badger and ublock ect as well as without. (I use librewolf on desktop for those who are gonna down vote this) Gecko based browsers are advised against on Graphene and is spoken in length about on reddit from one of their Devs. Chromium and google is a bad combo sure reliance on Google and all to begin with, but so is supporting Google to degoogle with a pixel device. Could brave be a honeypot? Sure and many other services. So could VPN providers and any service for that matter. The biggest advantage I see using Firefox is promoting a non google alternative and balancing the scale against googles monopoly. In some cases Tor adds risk due to it being a giant vacuum for govt or other malicious entities looking to snoop. Its like taping a sign to your traffic. I think it serves a purpose but that varies from each persons use case.
Yeah, TOR in particular seems to give a lot of people a false sense of security. I live out in a very remote area, I'm certainly not going to be using TOR, for obvious reasons.
Exactly, it’s childish cancel culture for completed unrelated nonsense. It’s one thing to be anti Chrome, but being anti Chromium is stupid, let alone that brave did a good job about it.
I’d like to see what peoples personal opinions are on every single Firefox dev, as well as the complete Mozilla corporate hierarchy… Oh ya, they don’t know, so it’s cool. Then of course the completely history and belief system of the devs of every browser addon they use as well. That type of stupidity has no end.
It just keeps reloading and after 5 tries it gives up. I could probably go through each domain manually but I’d like it if they could let me keep the 3rd party domains disabled.
I believe no. I’m running Firefox with arkenfox user.js and when I take this test www.bromite.org/detect it shows a new and different fingerprint if everytime i close and reopen the browser. Feel free to try it for yourself.
And while Brave may be private from outsiders, it is far from private from Brave Software themselves and I wouldn’t trust them if I was honest with you. If you want an alternative chromium based browser, check out Vivaldi. They don’t have aaaas many privacy features built in as Brave does but you can still get very private and obviously tack on Ublock origin and a customized DNS block list like you normally would with any other browser. And they are significantly more trustworthy than Brave
Maybe Cromite (the main bromite fork) would be better. Vivaldi isn’t great, but it also isn’t brave. It allows for blocklist importing and user scripts, and is on desktop Windows as well.
For best privacy AND security, Pixel 8 or 8 Pro with GrapheneOS. Nothing else compares. The Pixel 8 series are also the first that support hardware memory tagging, basically making them immune against 70% of all exploits.
In the end, choosing which project to use can be difficult just because of politics between the communities of these projects, saying a certain project is unsecure can get people using that project defensive, so keep that in mind
Sure, the Nothing phone is a decent phone but it doesn’t really have anything to offer as far as privacy and security are concerned. On the contrary, I wouldn’t trust Nothing since their iMessage fiasco.
I’ve never heard of this company before the past week, and I’m seeing it everywhere now. I’m also really annoyed with this trend of companies appropriating random fucking words instead of using actual names.
Lots of good advice here, but many might be too extreme. I find such all-or-nothing approach intimidating for people who just started to think about improving their privacy situation.
Let’s see… you are angry about bloatware. It can come from two sources - mobile service carrier and phone manufacturer. How to get rid of it?
Buy only “unlocked” phones. Then the carrier will not be able to push anything to your phone. You will also be free to change the carrier as you wish.
Buy phones from manufacturers that don’t install too much bloatware. Google Pixel has only Google apps, Motorola also is almost vanilla Google. Fairphone is more exotic, but an interesting option. iPhone is OK too if you want Apple ecosystem, but customization is not a thing there.
Now, we are in a privacy focused community and I saw your later comments about Google being an opposite of privacy. I would argue that vanilla Pixel is much better than bloated and locked Samsung already. I see you get recommendations to replace the OS that your new phone might run, and these are valid, but come with significant downsides. There are other ways to improve your privacy stance by changing the way how you use your phone without changing what phone or what OS you run on it.
Warning about bringing an unlocked phone to Verizon (even if it’s a current flagship Apple/Samsung/Google device): 50/50 they’ll lock you out of WiFi calling/HD voice, etc. Because they’re dicks.
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