I have just received a Samsung galaxy fold5 through the post, however I imagine it’s full of bloatware and I’m inexperienced with this type of device. What is the first things that you would do to secure it? Thank you 😊
Edit: I mean to be more privacy focused
I use FOSS applications as much as I can and try to avoid all samsung and google apps. In addition to that I’m always on pi-hole network to block background network requests by Samsung/Google
Some apps I use:
Don’t think I’d actually recommend Brave to anyone, it’s definitely not as privacy focused as they claim.
Not that I don’t believe you, but do you have any source for that? I’d like to read more about that claim because everywhere I search, Brave scores very high in terms of privacy
Problems with Brave
I pasted here the post by u/foamed [https://libreddit.oxymagnesium.com/u/foamed] at https://www.reddit.com/r/FoamList/comments/q4z5js/brave_browser_controversies/ [https://www.reddit.com/r/FoamList/comments/q4z5js/brave_browser_controversies/]
Some information about the co-founder & CEO of Brave, Brandon Eich [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich].
Controversial past and opinions:
Anti-vaxxer:
Eich pushed an anti-vaxx conspiracy on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1538253982845399040 [https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1538253982845399040] - If you look at the “source” it’s from a nutritionist who’s also a conspiracy nut. There are no verifiable and trusted sources.
Here are some controversies surrounding Brave and their browser over the past couple of years:
Privacy related:
Brave automatically redirected searches to affiliate version of URL’s which Brave profits from:
Brave collected donations on content creators behalf without consent:
Brave leaked Tor/Onion service requests through DNS:
And this to some degree where they temporarily whitelisted certain Facebook and Twitter trackers without telling their users:
Sending unsolicited marketing mail to users, though Brave claim its all anonymous:
And if you want more, here’s some more. https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/v44vut/brave_browser_sending_unsolicited_marketing_mail/ [https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/v44vut/brave_browser_sending_unsolicited_marketing_mail/] that links this Twitter interaction: https://nitter.net/sebmck/status/1531740563900448769 [https://nitter.net/sebmck/status/1531740563900448769]
Thank you for that incredibly thorough answer. It was very interesting to read through those articles.
I’m going to be honest, but upon diving deeper into them it seemed like for each sources I could find a similar instance of a shady instance that happened with Firefox while everything related to users’ privacy was addressed as some point or another. At the end of the day, I think the lesson here is that no major browser is 100% perfect and it’s up to personal choices (and sometimes users can get a little too fandom-y).
Thank you once again for going above and beyond!:)
Thankfully firefox is open source and has amazing community forks and configs like librewolf, mullvad, and arkenfox user.js. I personally don’t like to support the chromium monopoly, and firefox hardened is better on desktop hands down. Brave also shills crypto so much and makes money off ads so not a great look for a privacy browser.
Thank you so much for an actual reply, again. It’s so disheartening to see the level of “conversation” that goes around here sometimes. It can be such an echo chamber filled with entitled a-holes here at times (like every single time anyone dares to say anything about Firefox).
I also love Firefox and the fact it is open source. I also personally use Firefox and Arkenfox/Tor, but I’ve also tried Brave (and basically every other browser) and for the life of me cannot understand why the hate. I think we all care about privacy, so that should be the end goal. I will support anything that makes people more interested in privacy (which Brave does) and that helps in taking away from the monopolistic control of Google. You can dislike Brave CEO (as one should) but it’s not like Firefox is perfect either. Accepting money from Google, not supporting site isolation, associating your download with a token to keep telemetry on your usage, the extensive tweaks required to make it safe, or the overall delay within the community or for any improvements are all worthy criticisms to be aware of.
I do agree on many of your points and I used to use Brave before certain deal breakers. I personally have in addition mulch, cromite, and Privacy Browser for mobile so i can try different options. On desktop, gecko browser are much more comfortable, but i have the ungoogled chromium flatpak browser with ublock. Mozilla has a better track record than google for privacy and is big enough to have good security and updates, and often disallow features that would compromise privacy, that otherwise chromium accepts iirc.
…if you really have trouble finding stuff on how Brave is terrible for privacy, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say you have trouble reading. It’s known by most people that it’s a scam. They sold private user data to machine learning companies, they are predominantly a crypto company who has a browser, they are chromium based, etc
First of all, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if you attack people online simply for asking questions and discussing a topic on a discussion forum, you are a really shitty person.
Second of all, all you “arguments” are all lies that I’ve read a bunch of times on multiple forums but that you clearly never bothered to read up on because if you did, you’d realize that they amount to nothing and they keep being spread by people like you. You clearly have no proof for any of that since I asked you already and provided nothing. The only accurate thing you said is that is chromium based lol. Nice to see this instance of Privacy is getting filled with the same echo chamber mentality of late-stage Reddit.
look up controversies surrounding brave search.
I already did. But I have been talking about Brave browser. You don’t have to use their search engine?
I mean, the company and the browser is one in the same.
Next level mental gymnastics
Google play services constantly send information to google, the only functional and degoogled rom Ive found is Grapheneos.
Samsung locks their bootloader, so flashing is neigh impossible on them as of late.
Good to know, although I’m unsure how a custom boot would handle the folding display
Or LineageOS without GSF
The real downside of brave is the cryptocrap. It is still optional. However the fact that it support the chromium monopoly is also a bad point.
What about supporting anti-lgbtq causes
If you don’t install software made from people that are not align with your ethics there are probably more than just brave.
That’s quite a list, thank you. I’ll try to implement them 👌