No problems with the inbuild adblocker in Vivaldi, not even in YouTube (without any ads for me), problems only for Chromiums in which are remaining control and tracking APIs from Google and which are only can use “descaffeinated” Adblockers from the Chrome Store. I can use even direct userscripts in Vivaldi if needed, without the need of Tamper-, Greasy- or Violentmonkey extensions. Vivaldi is a Chromium browser, but Google for the past 9 years has hit its teeth on a rock in attempts to control it.
What irritates me many times when I enter Lemmy is that instead of my Nick at the top right, someone else’s Nickname appears for a moment, before changing it to mine. This is a sign of an open account sharing channel, which is quite serious and should be fixed quickly. Security at Lemmy is apparently non-existent.
For reliable results today it is essential to use several search engines. The one who crawls the web the longest is Google, it is therefore advisable to use search engines that use this engine, such as Whoogle or Startpage.
Even so, it is also necessary to use search engines with alternative engines, such as DDG (Bing), or search engines with several engines, such as Mojeek or MetaGer, which use their own crawlers, such as Groot or AstianGo.
Search engines that use AI are also now proliferating, but, although practical, so far none are truly privacy oriented, with one exception, the one that was the first to use this technique with AI, Andisearch, which uses its own language model, not logs, no ads, no tracking, anonymous.
You search, although more private than others, requires activating privacy in the settings, also questionable due to its other AI functionalities that it incorporates, apart from the registration requirement to use them.
As long as Mozilla has a contract with Google, it will continue to share data with Alphabet Inc. Firefox or forks are OK, but only if you use it without the sync function, or use another provider that doesn’t share the data with others. Although Mozilla encrypts the synced data, the necessary account data is shared and used by Google to track those.
It’s not always the fault of the device. It estimate the time based on the download speed in this moment, but it can’t know that in the next moment your ISP server slows down or that your AV stops the download for some times to analyze a suspicios file, things like this to make your day enjoyable. Because of this, never automatic updates. I recieve an notification if there is an update in the queue and so I can update when I like in a spare time.
All companies that have to pay for infrastructure, servers, employees and invoices naturally need income, as is logical and legitimate. Some use contextual ads, that is, tool ads on a DIY page. This may be annoying, but it does not put privacy at risk, but if it does, when the ads are based on the user’s history and data (surveillance advertising), this is what is massively used by US companies.
That there are other models to create income, for example what Proton does, with its Freemium services. The free Proton products (all of which are OpenSource, by the way), naturally have limited functions, but they do not require trafficking in user data, because they are financed through Premium services.
Andisearch, the first search engine on the market that used AI with its own language model, is strictly anonymous, no tracking or logging with sandboxed results, it is 100% free and private, for the future they plan to create a premium model for companies with specific functions for collaboration and special business functionalities, to finance the free version.
Vivaldi in new installations offers a selection of search engines (DDG, Ecosia, Startpage, etc.) and bookmarks, which pay a commission when the user uses them, if not, no, they are free to delete them, apart from a store with merch, upon insistence. from the users themselves sometime ago they also accept donations, probably also receive commissions from VAG, Mercedes, Polestar and Renault to include Vivaldi Automotive in their vehicles. All without trafficking in user data and without external investors so as not to lose independence, the mistake that Mozillla made when accepting Google as an investor. This is independent of having Google as the default search engine, since Google pays Mozilla and finances them, whether the user searches with Google or not.
It’s the surveillance policy, selling user data, which is the risk and will destroy the free internet if we don’t avoid it The ethics of a company respect to the user is the most important feature today, something that the big US companies don’t have.