It gets my goat that people think it’s a good option. There are plenty of articles explaining some of the many issues with it, but a few are:

  1. It’s run by anti-LGBTQ+ crypto bros.
  2. It has ads right out of the box.
  3. It collected donations towards people who never signed up for them - then held them to ransom in exchange for the kind of information you should never share on the Internet.
  4. They’re a for-profit advertising company. “Privacy-centric” my elbow.
  • xiii@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    10 days ago

    I’m surprised to read the whole thread and nobody mentioned that TorBrowser is the goat for daily anonymous browsing.

    • M1k3y@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      1·
      9 days ago

      That you’re even suggesting this tells me that you don’t use tor regularly. Many clearnet sites dont want to be accessed through tor and will just block you. If you encounter any recaptchas thats basically a dead end. The time from opening the browser to having a fully loaded site is minutes.

      If you don’t plan on doing serious crimes and your not an opposition leader in a totalitarian state, tor is not a good default browser.

    • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      10 days ago

      I thought people gave up on Tor years ago when it was revealed that it wasnt as anonymous as people expected due to the number of entry and exit nodes controlled by governments and spy agencies.

      • xiii@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        10 days ago

        The NSA wasn’t able to break Tor fundamentally, even with spanning numerous exit nodes to intercept traffic, and high-scale traffic correlation between enter and exit nodes

        “We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time.” It continues: “With manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users,” and says the agency has had “no success de-anonymizing a user in response” to a specific request.

        https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/nsa-gchq-attack-tor-network-encryption

        • Spice Hoarder@lemmy.zipEnglish
          0·
          10 days ago

          Do we trust a 12 year old article sourced from the government to be honest about current/past capabilities? Genuinely asking.

          • xiii@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            9 days ago

            This question is unironically very deep. As it’s privacy we’re talking, you decide what to trust on your own.

            My understanding is that Tor provides anonymity for my threat model (ad-tech corporations).

            But trust need to be placed somewhere. Do we trust Mozilla? All their emploees? Do we trust OSS? Does anybody actually review open-source code? What about supply chain attacks?

            I am, a nobody, was personally invited to a Contagious Interview (a person, pretending to be a client for consulting was trying to place a rootkit on my machine via GitHub repo).

            What about AI-assistet coding that actively tries to eliminate security gates?