Nowadays there is a lot of fuzzz about brave, because it is really paying for users to navigate online.
On the other hand, Mozilla has enhanced its privacy features.
Firefox now let you know who is tracking you. And blocking them by default

Choose your side: free money or real privacy?


https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/firefox-privacy-protections/

Thanks for sharing this.

I was reading, that's so absurd. Google has a big conflict of interest in the subject, what they are writing is unethical and immoral. Look at this:


They are basically saying that if you don't give them your data freely (by using their products) we will all have to pay for third party software, which are free now. Actually, those free software are buying google ads. If google ads becomes irrelevant, Google will lose their income, not us.

it is even possible that those publishers move to more democratic business models, like BAT/Brave or even something else.

Breaking google's ads monopoly is a gain for everyone but them.

I agree, that's something we really need to do.
However, the alternatives are very bad.

I was trying to using DuckDuckGo... I just kind find anything there. Have you ever tried to find bitcointalk topics there?

I was trying to find my merit source application. I wrote in DDG "Bitmover bitcointalk.org merit source application"

look at the results:


The result is completely ridiculous, as it has nothing to do with the searched terms.

On the other hand, Google results were amazing. I was able to find all the relevant discussions related to my application, even in other boards. I was able to find people mentioning my application elsewhere.


Until DDG or any other search engine has the minimum usability , there is no competition to many google products.

There is a lot of competition on Chrome, which is not the best browser. But android is by far the best OS for mobile (cheaper, more customizable, etc) and google is the best search engine... Sadly, Gmail is still the best mail service as well...

I believe proton mail is better than gmail, however it is paid (and not cheap). Hard to compete..

In which case why don't you look in to SearX instead? It's a meta-search engine which will search other engines on your behalf and display the combined results to you, all anonymously. You can host your own instance of it, and if you really want, you can configure it so it just searches Google and nowhere else and returns the results to you. You essentially get Google search without any of the tracking.

As TryNinja says, ProtonMail is free, but there are plenty of other free options availalbe, and paid options from as low as €1 a month. See here: https://www.privacytools.io/providers/email/

Well, you could always use something like Thunderbird to host your email and have as much storage as you want, and it integrates nicely with Lightning calendar. There are plenty of cloud storage services you can use which don't invade your privacy like Google, such as OwnCloud, NextCloud or Syncthing.

For every Google service there is a privacy respecting alternative. Sure, they might not be as convenient to use as Google, but Google can afford to hire entire teams of developers to work on their services with the money they make from selling your data. You are buying Google's premium services with your information as currency.

You can see the popularity of the search engines.

Bing is owned by Microsoft and yahoo is owned by Verizon Media. You do not except them to protect your privacy online because the their main purpose is earn the money even compromising the user's privacy. Unfortunately  the search engines which respects the privacy, are not so popular because their search results are not accurate.

Some of the advice in that article is poor, and mostly it seems to exist to convince people to buy Kaspersky products, which is absolutely not necessary if you care about your privacy.

This achieves literally nothing. Facebook, Instagram, Google, whoever, still have all your data and still sell it to third parties. The only way to avoid this is to not use them at all. Delete your accounts. You don't need them.

Unnecessary. Start here for advice on how toughen up your browser to avoid tracking: https://www.privacytools.io/browsers/

Actually laughed at this one. Thinking WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, which is having backdoors built in to it at the request of the US government, is a good choice for secure messaging is laughable. Use Signal or Riot.

Again, completely unnecessary. Why would you buy a closed source piece of software, when better open source alternatives exist for free. Use KeePass.

Biometrics are not secure. Avoid their use.

If security is your main concern, I would advocate not shopping around and sticking with either Firefox or Tor.

The problem with the vast majority of Firefox forks - Waterfox, Pale Moon, Basilisk, to name the most common - is that they are based on old versions and old code, and they lag behind Firefox in terms of security updates, sometimes by several weeks or even months. Any time bugs or security flaws are discovered, after Firefox patches them the devs of each fork has to examine the patch, adjust it as necessary to work with their fork, test it, and then integrate it. Some critical vulnerabilities have gone unpatched for weeks, which is an unacceptable security risk.

Also worth pointing out that the most popular Firefox fork - Waterfox - has been bought over by an advertising company.