Browsers allow websites to have persistent storage apart from cookies.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/IndexedDB_API

The user not having a choice is dumb either way. VPN users are the minority.

Browsers (except for Tor) doing this in the name of privacy is so dumb. Our timezones are already apparent due to our IP addresses. Not only does this not hide the timezone but also makes the user more fingerprintable. Now I’m the dumbass from Ohio who’s browser reports UTC timezone for some reason.

I gave you the real reason it should be controversial. Brave’s fuck ups have not been significantly worse than other companies’.

re: open source In theory: yes. In practice: maybe. It’ll probably eventually be caught by some researcher but unlike popular belief all open source code bases are not constantly being audited by the community. A random person can’t just read Brave source code for all platforms and accurately gauge if they’re doing something nefarious. It is very easy to hide stuff in code or misuse a protocol for evil purposes, etc.

You can modify the source code but as evident by the fact that there’s no Brave fork with crypto removed (there was one but their branding was too similar to Brave’s so they got sued), it’s not an easy feat to maintain that.

It’s backed by Peter Thiel who is a war mongering Nazi billionaire.

Can you really talk about E2EE on a closed source app? The whole point of E2EE is I don’t trust the vendor. If they give me a blob as a client and tell me it’s E2EE, am I supposed to just trust them all of a sudden?

What about people planning terrorist attacks before they go into Austria? The geniuses did not think about that.

The Netflix analogy does not make any sense in this context.

they could always ask. Ask and then listen.

Not nearly enough people turn on optional telemetry. I’ll bet you don’t always either.

I know Brave is controversial but they were the only ones (edit: not sure about Vanadium, I’m curious if they were vulnerable) disallowing JS to access localhost thus blocking Meta and Yandex’s recently discovered spying.

Sounds like such a no brainer to not allow random websites to communicate with the localhost and very easily circumvent all sandboxing you spent thousands of hours building. Looking at you Android (Google) and all the browser vendors (also Google?, huh).

I am happy they’re giving people a choice. On the other hand, the fact is, (privacy respecting) telemetry is the only way to make a program as complicated as a web browser better. Especially important when your competition is a giant data hoarder with orders of magnitude more users. And people will just not turn on opt-in telemetry.

Is there an easy way to transition from Spotify other than looking for all of your songs yourself?

Yeah Jellyfin was forked from Emby’s last open release IIRC.