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Epic, The Privacy Browser
- devx 13y agoI like it, but can you at least add Startpage/Ixquick and DDG as options for search engines? Options are good and people might not use it without having those options.
- metastart 13y agoThanks!! Working on more search options!!
- metastart 13y ago@devx thanks! Will be adding both those search engines to the search options in an update soon.
- spolu 13y agoIs there a white listing for third-party cookies? Does it break facebook likes currently?
- metastart 13y ago@spolu, we do block fb widgets and such...but a like link should work. You can via our "umbrella button" allow third-party cookies on any website.
- 3825 13y agoI don't mean to offend you but how does Hidden Reflex make money from and/or fund Epic, the Privacy Browser?
- spolu 13y agoThey could eventually sell the browser?
- spolu 13y agoThey also note that they are routing your searches through their proxy; right there they could monetize. But it would be self defeating...
- metastart 13y agoSorry not our proxy. A third party proxy powered by Spotflux.
- metastart 13y agoSearch. We earn revenues whenever you make searches via Epic. Note though your searches are always private and sponsored/unsponsored results are only based on your query and rough geo-location. We will base any results on tracking or allow any searches or browsing to be tracked. It's not really required either -- Google tracks you and saves your data to target non-search ads (search ads via your search term can be naturally targeted)!!
- megantic 13y agoAds. When you use the browser search engine. See the faq on their website.
- M4v3R 13y agoThis is a nice initiative, but I would like to see the source code of this browser. Without it, I cannot be 100% sure that what Epic devs say is true and it's not an elaborate NSA trick to get our data :). No hard feelings, just in the light of current events as reported by NY Times/Guardian about NSA backdooring popular apps and crypto implementations the paranoid inside me has gotten more active lately.
- spolu 13y agoAdditionally it's based on Chromium, so there's not much source code to hide as many of us have a good idea of what the source code would look like.
- metastart 13y agoComing soon!! Write us if you want to see anything now!!
- hoers 13y agoDo you have a changelog with an overview of changes you've made? I think this along with the source itself should be something really high on your todo list if you want to establish a trustful image
- metastart 13y agoGood thought -- thanks!! Will work on a changelog and making all code available very very soon! In terms of other issues, we and everyone rely on the whole open source community to be watchful over chromium and report any possible "backdoors"! It's a massive codebase and we're still a small team!!
- benwerd 13y agoIsn't releasing the source code a condition of using the open source Chromium code? Putting your code out should be effortless. Just put it out there; cleaning it up can happen later.
- nrivadeneira 13y agoI still can't figure out why my browsing data being sold is objectively a bad thing. I don't see how it makes my day-to-day worse in any way. There are plenty of smart people who feel that it's bad, so maybe I'm just missing something, and I'm open to sound logic that convinces me that it's going to make my life worse. Also, the example they make at the bottom asking the reader to imagine hundreds of people following them around and watching their every move is a bit disingenuous. It's more like a handful of people following millions. At that point in time, you're not much more than a data point.
- simias 13y agoI think the problem is that it's creating an infrastructure that can then be used for nefarious purposes. And then there's no way for you to know when the line is crossed between what you consider tolerable and what you feel infringes on your privacy.
- metastart 13y agoThere are hundreds of companies that track you actually and they sell that data to many, many others. In an average hour of browsing, about 40 will try to track you. What you browse & search is very personal and very revealing - it's dangerous that anyone have that data and use it to determine what prices to charge you for goods, for insurance or whether you should even be offered a policy, or more e.g. searching for "pressure cooker" and "backpacks" led to a visit from six FBI agents to a writer. https://medium.com/something-like-falling/2e7d13e54724 https://medium.com/something-like-falling/2e7d13e54724 ...there are tons more examples I could provide!
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- metastart 13y agoThanks for the update to the pressure cooker/backpack article - nevertheless there was a police visit based on his googling which is a bit scary. There are many dangers you could imagine if what you search could be used against you (assuming it's not private).
- vjeux 13y agoYou actually lose quite a lot in term of ease of use and performance when trying to be fully anonymous :( History, Password saving, Auto-suggest, Web Cache, Automatic Browser Updates, Spell check, DNS pre-fetching & cache.
- metastart 13y agoPrivacy isn't "free", you're right. Epic supports password saving -- since it's the user's choice, we determined that we could leave it in. Many things can be done in a private way, so for example we have implemented local address bar auto-fill, so you can type "f" and have facebook.com appear but it's not based on your history nor any query to a web server. We will be building in more such services to make using Epic both private and convenient!! Epic does by the way auto-update for Windows though we hope to make it optional in the future for the extremely privacy conscious. For the Mac, it will give you a pop-up when there's an update so it's just about as simple as auto-updating.
- qbproger 13y agoCan't spell check be a completely local feature without hitting any outside servers? I didn't understand why that was disabled.
- metastart 13y agoYes you're right spell check surely can be! We'll work on it. Chromium is difficult to work with as something like spell check will be built to be supported as a web service so migrating it to a local service takes a bit of time. Great idea though and something we will work on!
- lowmagnet 13y agoI like the functionality of the 'umbrella' button. Is it something developed specifically for epic? I didn't see it out there for regular chrome.
- metastart 13y agoThanks! Yes, only for Epic as it integrates all our services. A lot of things in Epic are only available in Epic:-)
- jwcrux 13y ago> Epic automatically routes your searches through its proxy to protect them. Sounds sketchy.
- metastart 13y agoSorry through a third-party proxy service powered by Spotflux. You're right that if it was powered by us, it would be sketchy in terms of a privacy improvement!
- dsl 13y agoA third-party proxy that I don't select is still sketchy. I've never heard of Spotflux before, and don't know that they aren't owned and operated by one of your advertising partners.
- untothebreach 13y agoI see under the download button it says, 'more versions coming soon'...happen to know when us linux users will get some love?
- cji 13y agoInteresting choice of name considering http://epic.org/ http://epic.org/
- metastart 13y agoWe've been the Epic Browser for years now - were stuck with the name contractually!
- hngiszmo 13y agoWTF??? Guys, wake up! If it is not open source, it does not protect your privacy. Period. We see how other companies got coerced into breaking privacy for some dollars. The company-driven closed source development is flawed as long as we grant governments this power. What we need is not yet another startup that tries to make money on our private data (yeah, read Epic's FAQ how they make money). We need a stack of hardware and software you can easily trust. My dream is to use a computer that is produced on an open design by one of hundreds of fabs that would call out a competitor that puts backdoors into the chips to boost their own reputation. My dream is a software stack that is completely signed by tons of trustful developers with the possibility to easily add my signature after bit-reproducibly compiling code I checked. If this comes true, people will identify easier the packages that were developed by companies only and find ways to replace them for a trustworthy stack. Open source apps distributed via Android market for example are closed source apps compiled by the developer from code he maybe shared and that was possibly modified by google running on video-audio-multi-sensor-bugs with several agencies having a direct wire to them. If you still use windows, your PC is not better than that. Think about it. Thanks to Snowden we can finally talk about these issues without a single person calling us paranoid.
- metastart 13y agoEpic is open source...anyone who wants our source code, just write us!! Sorry we've been struggling to get the product ready and hadn't prepared to release all the code yet but will do it fast. Chromium is a huge code base & we're a small team so we hadn't gotten to it yet. We don't make any money from anyone's private data or any data (period). We make revenues at this point exclusively from searches you do via our private search engine & always protect your searches' privacy. Thanks for other ideas...others can comment...
- Sir_Cmpwn 13y agoGitHub. Just make a GitHub repo.
- sergiotapia 13y agoJust plop whatever you have in it's current state on Github. _Any_ code is better than no code. No one will use this unless it's open sourced.
- Sagat 13y agoThere is probably a backdoor for government agencies anyway.
- metastart 13y agoIf you find one in Chromium PLEASE let us know!!!
- zedai 13y agoThis is really the need for the hour. I always loved chrome but never felt being tracked. Thats why i always used firefox instead. But this is exactly what i wanted. Also, being an INDIAN, i feel proud.
- tptacek 13y agoSounds awesome. I'll definitely use this instead of the browser project whose TLS stack is maintained by one of the best known crypto software developers on the Internet, and run by the company that has almost singlehandledly mainstreamed TLS forward secrecy.
- psycr 13y agoWell, for the unenlightened, which one is that? Firefox? Chrome?
- philip1209 13y agocURL - the most secure way to browse the internet.
- ynniv 13y agoStallman (still?) uses wget over email: http://www.stallman.org/stallman-computing.html http://www.stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
- RandomSpamMan 13y agoOut of interest, has anyone noticed anything outside of the ordinary? My antivirus (Kaspersky) is flagging it as a Trojan. http://i.imgur.com/qTW8zPu.png http://i.imgur.com/qTW8zPu.png
- dsl 13y agoKaspersky identifies modified versions of popular applications. I suspect they don't know Epic is a "legitimate" modification of Chromium yet.
- genetik 13y agoIs this a re-launch of the Epic browser originally released in 2010 which targeted Indian users? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_(web_browser)
- hpagey 13y agoI think it is. I remember the name of the company was hidden reflex. One of my classmates was working for it.
- megantic 13y agoLooks like an attempt at pivoting, jumping of the privacy bandwagon. Doesn't really make a good case that this browser is based on belief of privacy as stated in their faq.
- appamatto 13y agoWhat is being done here to combat browser fingerprinting? This seems like the most challenging threat to anonymity.
- metastart 13y agoWe block tons of fingerprinting scripts. More coming soon (fingerprinting is tough!).
- CoreLogic 13y agoNice try NSA...
- jfasi 13y agoI find it a little suspicious that a browser that purports to be private gives a unique fingerprint on panopticlick... https://panopticlick.eff.org https://panopticlick.eff.org
- M4v3R 13y agoThat's probably because its settings are so unique and different from other browsers. And since not many people check that site, you could be the first one.
- autodidakto 13y agoIt mentions fingerprinting as a threat, but doesn't do anything specific against it. Probably because no one is quite sure how to stop it. From the FAQ: How does Epic protect against browser fingerprinting? There is no agreed-upon way to prevent browser fingerprinting or device fingerprinting at this point. There are many fingerprinting techniques which a solution would need to protect against. While we are working on a more thorough solution [...] I imagine it could send the default plugin/header/user agent of IE/Chrome/Firefox, or random stuff each time...
- metastart 13y agoEpic at present blocks tons of fingerprinting scripts. Comments above seem right to us as well that user-agent doesn't make sense to use from a fingerprinting perspective. Fonts+Plugins do though. We actually do and could've released things to protect against fingerprinting actively right now BUT it wouldn't have been comprehensive or defended against some of the key things we'd imagine a fingerprinter would use e.g. flash fonts call & more. So there's more work to be done - please join our forums and help us come up with more thorough solutions for fingerprinting.
- nieve 13y agoI just checked myself and the identifying info for me was by a huge margin fonts & plugins. User Agent will become far less relevant if Epic gets more adoption and keeps a lock-step updating pattern. Perhaps as use of web fonts becomes more common perhaps it will become more feasible to send just a static list that's the same for all Epic users[1]. I suspect there's a potential cache-enumeration issue that would help tag browsers there, but I'm not sure. As for plugins, that's a bit more difficult - I wouldn't mind an option to ask if I wanted to let a site enumerate plugins, but you start getting into header games & pointless reloads there if you're not careful. [1] I force my own fonts for everything, so no UX issues for me. No idea how much of an issue it is for other folks.
- hellbanTHIS 13y agoThis is cool and I'm going to use it but I want people make money too, so personally I'd be fine if you took my geographic location and served me ads based on that. I want to know what's on sale at the nearest grocery store, and I wouldn't be too creeped out if you knew where I was geographically. But maybe that's just me.
- diN0bot 13y agohow to use epic with 1password plugin?
- metastart 13y agoPlugins work with Epic - another user has said 1password works in Epic.
- alan_cx 13y agoAny one know how this compares with SRWare Iron?
- richardlblair 13y agoThis second this is on github, I will download it. I look forward to it.
- user2 13y agoCompanies are trying capture as much information about you as possibly by casting a wide net of "trackers". The truth is companies don't know what to do with all of your data.
- megantic 13y agoI cringe when I read their claim to be "the first-ever privacy-focused browser built on chromium". Iron[1] was first released in 2008 to circumvent privacy issues with chrome. I wonder if they did a really poor job at researching what already exists and are truly clueless about iron, or if they outright lied for marketing purposes. Hopefully they're not clueless about privacy and are not lying about features, though I would not bet my privacy on "hopefully" specially when epic browser website lacks an https version and epic browser bears a unique fingerprint on panopticlick. [1] https://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php https://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php
- metastart 13y agoSRware is focused on removing google stuff...not really privacy in general, at least from our view.