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This is the same browser that did the opposite before: injecting their own referral parameter in links.
by timvisee 4y ago
This is the same browser that did the opposite before: injecting their own referral parameter in links.
- dormento 4y agoTo be fair, seemed to be by mistake and quickly corrected. They also issued an apoogy. (disclamer: I still use Firefox and recomend you do so as well).
- rovr138 4y agoThat's a really intentional mistake to make. Another Firefox user
- colordrops 4y agoFirefox does all kinds of shady tracking too unfortunately. Really the best option is to use forks of chrome or Firefox if you are concerned with privacy.
- harry8 4y ago[citation needed]
- colordrops 4y agoUh, just go into the settings? It's right there.
- harry8 4y agoUh. Just spell out your concerns and /why/ you need a fork to address them? Or provide a link that does so.
- colordrops 4y agoBecause I don't want browsing or other behavior data sent to a third party. Does that really need to be explained?
- zamnos 4y agoWe don't know what you're referring to. What you haven't is explained is what shady tracking you're accusing Firefox of doing, or what to turn off in the settings. Going into about:config and searching for "shady tracking" returns zero results.
- colordrops 4y ago* "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla" * "Allow Firefox to make personalized extension recommendations" * "Allow Firefox to install and run studies" * "Block dangerous and deceptive content" * "Pocket" add-on installed by default. I don't recall opting in to any of these things when I installed firefox. This isn't some conspiracy or hard to understand concept. They are right there in the settings page, not in the config flags, and I don't understand why it's so difficult to believe this or just look yourself.
- harry8 4y agoWe were interested in what you were talking about and now we know because you've actually said. That's the way this site is supposed to work. Generally considered a good thing when people are interested in what you have to say, putting barriers in the way seems less than an ideal strategy. So there are five settings that you believe are set to the wrong default. This causes you to mistrust firefox in total and want to use a fork that you deem more trustworthy but haven't mentioned any fork or how you decided that they are more trustworthy. That is all 100% totally and utterly reasonable and we can take it on board and use it to adjust our views or not now that we know what you're talking about. Thanks for posting it clearly that is worth the time it takes. The inital comment is mostly noise and in my view, not worth posting.
- kryptozinc 4y agoSource?
- DangitBobby 4y agoFirst party: go to the settings and look.
- nicce 4y agoSadly, that is a standard procedure for many current businesses. Do things until you get caught, then say it was a mistake and apogolize. Of course there are real mistakes, but this one was quite difficult to make…
- dahdum 4y agoThe mistake was getting caught? Eich’s initial response was that was intentional and ethical. Until it went viral and his view evolved. Granted, I’m not too keen to give him or Brave much benefit of doubt. https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1269289242905042944 https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1269289242905042944
- dools 4y agoDoesn’t look like it was a privacy problem nor does it look like he claimed it was “by mistake”. Seems perfectly reasonable to me and everyone over reacted so they took it off.
- chaps 4y agoCan you explain how it's not a privacy problem?
- spoiler 4y agoThey included Brave's affiliate ID, not the users. I think. So, it didn't reveal anything "new' (for fingerprinting) or anything that can identify the user.
- hackernewds 4y agoSeems like they wanted to hold the data for themselves and backtracked because " Sorry we got caught"
- joshuaissac 4y ago> Seems like they wanted to hold the data for themselves Hold what data? The affiliate ID?
- soundnote 4y agoBrave could know the user... used Brave?
- princevegeta89 4y agoIf we're buying in that "by mistake" nonsense we're being so incredibly naive. How can someone even programatically inject referral links in your page "by mistake"? I've seen too many instances like Google Chrome still tracking you in incognito where companies just come back with they were doing it "by mistake" to believe any of them were really saying the truth.
- Arainach 4y ago>Google Chrome still tracking you in incognito When was this?
- darig 4y ago[dead]
- shakna 4y agoThe lawsuit [0][1] was filed in 2020. [0] https://dockets.justia.com/docket/california/candce/5:2020cv03664/360374 https://dockets.justia.com/docket/california/candce/5:2020cv... [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-google-privacy-lawsuit-idUSKBN23933H https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-google-privacy-l...
- Arainach 4y agoThat's not what the lawsuit says at all. The lawsuit doesn't say Chrome is doing anything. It's claiming that websites, including those owned by Google, are tracking things in incognito sessions. This is because there is no flag that says "this is an incognito session" sent to the site, and the existence of any such flag would be a bug. There's a constant arms race between sites trying to detect incognito and browsers closing the holes.
- blacksmith_tb 4y agoHmm, not sure it's too likely that sites can differentiate between first time visitors and Incognito / Private browsing, unless they tested for behavior that first time visitors shouldn't be able to do, like signing in (even then that could be a different device, or they might have cleared cookies). In general I would expect most sites to be less interested in identifying Incognito than ad blockers?
- unxdfa 4y agoEich doesn't seem like the sort of person who makes mistakes, preferring to do a PR backtrack after misjudging his audience after comparing them to his own dubious standards. Never the sort who thinks they did something wrong but likes you to think they did.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tincholio 4y agoWell, there's the whole JS thing... :D
- unxdfa 4y agoDon’t depress me further :)
- BrendanEich 4y agoI don't make mistakes? News to me. This kind of heads-I-win-tails-you-lose argument is circular at bottom: I'm bad because I don't make mistakes so it was intentional; any attempt to correct a mistake is backtracking. No, it was a mistake. We fixed it. If you expect perfection, stop using Firefox too because Mozilla has made mistakes, including some similar ones. (I don't think they are reasons to stop using Firefox, I'm just applying your fake standard.)
- karlzt 4y ago*apology
- kerkeslager 4y agoIn what way did it "seem to be by mistake"? Brendan Eich is literally the guy who normalized letting websites run code on your machine. Even if we generously assume his intentions are good, the kind of thinking that brought us JavaScript is not even capable of grokking what I want from my browser in terms of privacy, security, and respect for my attention. Even if Brave's commitments to these values is genuine and not just marketing, they simply don't know what those values mean. Even if you trust their intentions, you can't trust their execution. They started, right off the bat, by getting in bed with advertisers. That's their revenue stream. That's not how you fund a browser that serves users, that's how you fund a browser that serves advertisers. Even if their intentions are good, they don't know how to execute them. "Mistakes" like injecting redirects into links are exactly what I'd expect Brave to do intentionally, not something I'd assume is a mistake.
- MrOwnPut 4y agoAll browsers deal in advertising, it's the only way to make money on a free product. And if you don't want the JS that Eich created to run in your browser, you can turn it off... most people like to run sandboxed code instead of installing native programs. Mozilla makes most of their money from Google Search referrals. Chrome was entirely built to put more eyeballs on Google ads and track you. There's a lot more privacy features built into Brave than there are in other browsers. It's user oriented, not adtech oriented. Of Brave, Chrome, and Firefox, who has the built in ad blocker?
- kerkeslager 4y ago> All browsers deal in advertising, it's the only way to make money on a free product. That's a pretty confidently wrong statement. You're aware of Wikipedia, right? More directly relevant: Konqueror? And as is typical of HN, you seem to be unaware that people might be motivated by things other than money. Browsers are a large enough undertaking that you need some money to make one sustainably, but when money isn't your primary motivation it turns out you can do quite a bit with less. > There's a lot more privacy features built into Brave than there are in other browsers. It's user oriented, not adtech oriented. Brave is literally adtech. They sell ads.
- colordrops 4y agoHow long ago was this? Is it still the case? And why the flood of comments like this in every Brave thread, but never on Chrome threads? Chrome is purely and unapologetically a portal specifically for supporting an ad network, yet I never see the same sort of comments. At least Brave is upfront about what they are doing.
- yucky 4y agoBecause these are astroturfed responses attacking Brave. You see it on here anytime the browser is mentioned. Meanwhile, it's the best browser available by a mile which explains their attacks.
- suprjami 4y agoGot an impartial source for "best"? https://privacytests.org/ https://privacytests.org/ is created by a Brave employee, so that doesn't count
- GeorgeWBasic 4y agoYou're asking someone for a source for their opinion, instead of understanding what an opinion is?
- judge2020 4y ago"which explains their attacks" implies "they only attack brave because they know it's objectively better than other browsers".
- yucky 4y ago[flagged]
- crummy 4y agopeople are paying hacker news commenters to post this stuff?
- dheera 4y ago> without interfering with coarse-grained campaign-level tracking I often manually scrub campaign-level stuff when sending links to friends just to have nicer, shorter URLs
- dexterdog 4y agoWhy do it only then? I wrote a greasemonkey script that pulls most of those before I can even click on them and resolves many known redirectors. I would release it, but it really is a mess and really only works for me. I assume somebody has released something similar, but I couldn't find anything a few years back when I wanted it so I cobbled it together.
- NayamAmarshe 4y agoI'm honestly surprised by the disingenuity of comments like these. Hiding facts on purpose, jumping on the hate train and twisting the situation to make a FOSS browser look bad. I'm reposting my comment from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34919771#34939391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34919771#34939391 > It wasn't 'caught' with anything, as much as those spicy news articles would have you believe. It was a URL suggestion bug. It was supposed to be turned off by default, and suggest content instead of replacing it. The bug was fixed in a day after release, the PR is on GitHub. Brave is open source, unlike Chrome and Edge. Let's stop treating FOSS like the other spyware. This also happened when Brave was like 5 months old. The feature since then has been turned off by default and the affiliate thing was shut down a long ago.
- planede 4y agoThis is Brave's official response on the affiliate link matter: https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/ https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/ So they did intend to put affiliate links into suggestions, and the bug was that it was accidentally applied to autocomplete in the URL bar based on the first suggestion. I think the original intention was shady enough. It's good that they changed direction on this, but the damage on their reputation is well justified in my opinion.
- timvisee 4y agoThis is exactly what I meant, and isn't something "accidental".
- NayamAmarshe 4y ago> So they did intend to put affiliate links into suggestions, and the bug was that it was accidentally applied to autocomplete in the URL bar based on the first suggestion. and I fail to see how is that a 'threat to privacy' or something so outrageous that people are still holding a grudge after years. Firstly, the feature was off by default, so that those who wanted to support Brave could enable it. Secondly, the affiliate thing was only supposed to suggest the link and not replace it. Hence, the 'bug'. Thirdly, this was not a privacy risk in any way. The affiliate link were only suggested for a few crypto websites and nothing else. Fourthly, the bug was fixed in day. Years ago. Affiliate thing was shut down instantly and since then, nothing of that sort has been tried by Brave. > I think the original intention was shady enough Then I guess Firefox providing Google search as default, without asking you is shady too? or Firefox installing a whole extension for Mr.Robot without asking its users was shady too? what about Pocket? Featuring articles from partners. I still don't see the outrage.
- BrendanEich 4y agoStop using dishonest language: "links" mean hyperlinks in pages, and we never added any affiliate code to those. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31088549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31088549