Semikkah7

Brave Browser and Search an update on Internet Privacy

I previously wrote this article on Internet Privacy with some recommendations for ProtonMail, Signal, DuckDuckGo, Firefox, and Tor. Nearly a year later, I want to revisit this and offer some updates in the Internet browser and search space.

Brower

The ultimate issue with browsers like Chrome is that they are often collecting data about you in the background that they are sharing with the company that created the browser. A rule of thumb is that when you install the software, if it is free, ask yourself why? Why would google provide for free software (like Docs, Sheets, etc) that other companies like Microsoft (Word and Excel) sell. The answer is that they are collecting data about you that they can use to target you for ads or selling to others. The browser actually has the most data about you. What keys did you type? What sites did you visit? How long did you stay? All of this personal and possibly sensitive information is available to the browser and could be used for nefarious purposes if the software developers choose to.

If you are using google search, gmail, google docs, chrome, and and Android phone, then google has a nearly perfect digital fingerprint of you. I’m still looking for a good option to move away from google or apple for phone. So perhaps the best we can do is move away from the others.

After using Firefox for most of a year, I found it was sometimes slow, and some sites did not work properly. I eventually decided to look for alternatives. I looked at Opera, Brave and Vivaldi. I eventually choose to switch to Brave a few months ago both on my computer and my phone. Brave blocks ads automatically. Brave has a different revenue model paying you for your attention. This article gives a good overview of the advantages of Brave over Chrome and Vivaldi. Over 30 million people are now using Brave instead of Chrome. You can download for your computer here. For your phone go to the Google Play or the Apple App Store.

In my original article I also referenced the Tor Browser. While this provides a level of anonymity that is useful, the Tor Browser itself is a bit clumsy – often does not format web pages properly, etc. However, Brave includes the ability to create a “Private Window” and a “Private Window with Tor”. In other words, Tor is built into Brave and hence Tor is no longer directly needed for web browsing.

Internet Search

While DuckDuckGo has served me well. I also found that sometimes the search results were too limited. When I switched to the Brave browser I found that it also had a built in search engine. I decided to give it a try. Typically search results are good and I find what I’m looking for. There are a couple of times when I have searched for something and couldn’t find what I was looking for so I’d manually try DuckDuckGo and or Google itself. Regardless, limiting the use of Google search is better than using it all the time. Learn more about Brave Search here.

Summary

My current recommendations are