2mo ago

The internet has changed. Privacy left behind

As we rushed into the Web 2 era, privacy was left behind. There was a naive view that users could consent to something that was impossible to understand. The result was tracking and monitoring of every activity.

I chatted to Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, Co-Founder of Brave, and the Co-founder of Mozilla. We talk about how the privacy landscape evolved on the internet, and the future of our technology-driven world.

00:00 The Serfs Have to Band Together! 00:51 Why Privacy Matters 04:30 Privacy Nihilism 06:29 The Rise of Extensions 11:48 Brave and Ads 15:06 Privacy is Now Marketable 16:31 Bridging the Divide Between Users 19:58 They Are Profiling You 21:50 Incentive for Government Control 23:30 Tech Optimism 24:48 Users Matter Most 28:57 Companies Can Make a Big Difference 31:47 UBlock Origin and Google 33:23 There is No End to Security 36:14 Braves Large Movement of Users 37:37 Decentralization Pays Off 38:00 Users Can Tilt Markets 38:55 What the Future Holds 39:39 Privacy Acceleration

We need more tools that make it possible to not only maintain privacy, but to still have a user-friendly experience at the same time. We, as users, need to fight back and demand it.

Brought to you by NBTV team members: Lee Rennie, Will Sandoval and Naomi Brockwell

Odysee link from the comments: https://odysee.com/@NaomiBrockwell:4/BRENDAN-EICH:9

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17 comments

ahh yes brave, the browser that has built in crypto scams, will add affiliate links so they can make money off your purchases, is built on Chrome so has no pretense of privacy anyways, and was created by a guy who donated to anti lgbtq causes. I'm sure they are the ones who will save us from those evil corps who want our data.
- Not all crypto is scams, admittedly a lot of it is, but there are some actual genuine innovations such as Monero.
  
  The scam ones are those that are treated as stocks rather than digital cash.
- As soon as people use Chrome and Chromium interchangeably, you can ignore anything they're saying on the matter.
- As sad as it is, the Brave and Mozilla issues are unfortunately nearly 1:1
  Both have ads baked in. Brave turns them off by default but tries to get you to turn them on and gives you fractions of a cent in crypto if you do. Mozilla has them on by default.
  Both try to upsell you on services
  Both have bundled things in their browser. Brave it was their VPN and affiliate link scandal. Mozilla was plugins like the Mr Robot plugin and changing people's search engines to Bing without their consent when negotiating with Google.
  Both have made fringe political donations
  So now it comes down do you want Chromium to support Google's monopoly while having better performance, compatibility, and privacy defaults. Or do you want to buck their monopoly but have more tracking (unless LibreWolf), PPA, and worse performance/compatibility.
  Most are just picking what they consider the less bad for their use case.
  I'm sure they are the ones who will save us from those evil corps who want our data.
  Nobody's going to save us unfortunately. Unless maybe Servo or Ladybird become a thing.
  
  yeah im not saying mozilla will be our savior, and ladybird/servo are promising but nowhere near complete. the biggest difference is that firefox is open source, you can build the browser with none of that stuff in it, and yeah thats not easy for most users, but most users dont care and wont do it anyways. chrome on the other hand, yeah chromium is "open source" but most of the important stuff that chrome based browsers actually use are not open source, and they are more than willing to take features away from users because if they didnt they would lose money, just like how they have done with manifest v3 and adblockers. at the end of they day we dont have a good browser, and thats a shame, because its a really insurmountable task without proper funding.
  
  Both have ads baked in. Brave turns them off by default but tries to get you to turn them on and gives you fractions of a cent in crypto if you do. Mozilla has them on by default.
  What ads does Firefox have?
  Both have bundled things in their browser. Brave it was their VPN and affiliate link scandal. Mozilla was plugins like the Mr Robot plugin and changing people’s search engines to Bing without their consent when negotiating with Google.
  The Mr. Robot plugin stopped being auto-installed a day after people complained about it back in 2017 (7 years ago), and I don't think this ever happened again, while Brave still does its thing to this day (to my knowledge), I haven't been able to find any info on that second point.
  Both have made fringe political donations
  Which fringe political donations has Mozilla made?
  
  Firefox has ads by pocket on your homescreen and sponsored search results to name the two that come to my mind.
  Brave did the affiliate link injection in 2020, but reversed and apologized shortly after. Similar to Mozilla's Mr robot thing, it seems to be a one off fuck up that they reversed and apologised for.
  Mozilla has made donations to the Mack group who have expressed hatred towards people who are white. It's certainly less dangerous for a minority to spread hateful rhetoric to a majority, but rasicm is still racism, which is bad.
  
  Firefox has ads by pocket on your homescreen and sponsored search results to name the two that come to my mind.
  Forgot about the home screen sponsored stuff since it's so easy to disable it, as for sponsored search results, I've only been able to find stuff about sponsored search suggestions, minor detail. Mozilla suggest
  Mozilla has made donations to the Mack group who have expressed hatred towards people who are white.
  I've not been able to find much info on this, the only thing I found was a member's only blog post by luduke (who I don't trus), so I can't say much about this.
  
  What ads does Firefox use?
  I think they're probably referring to adblocking.
  
  No I mean things like sponsored by pocket and sponsored search results.
  
  Ohh, yea those too
  completely forgot firefox does that
  
  To be fair, I wouldn't trust stock Firefox indeed, as it also has bad defaults and has demonstrated disrespect to users' consent (like turning on the ad tracking option without even informing anyone). I would rather opt for a hardening user.js or a fork with them pre-applied, like Librewolf.

17 comments