From this post:

Vivaldi's approach to privacy almost made me laugh, "we block others from tracking you so we can do it ourselves"

When you install Vivaldi browser (“Vivaldi”), each installation profile is assigned a unique user ID that is stored on your computer. Vivaldi will send a message directly to our servers located in Iceland every 24 hours containing this ID, version, cpu architecture, screen resolution and time since last message.

If being fingerprinted by hardware wasn't bad enough, your literally assigned a unique id, don't even bother defending vivaldi on this one.

Vivaldi is proprietary so no one can audit the browser, no one can fork it to remove spyware, you base everything on blind trust.

Their new tab is bloated by tracking companies meaning on each new tab a query will be made to amazon, youtube etc. Sure you can remove these, but most people won't and it shouldn't be included by default.

Its default search engine is bing, how great, so "we at vivaldi care so much about user privacy that we recieve monetary gain from microsoft by sneaking that little search engine in, which a huge percentage of our users will use as they're not aware of the privacy issues because they trust vivaldi"

We at vivaldi block trackers so we can boast about it, but our adblocker is disabled by default because we dont want anyone using it.

Google safe browsing is on by default with no proxied option

It uses googles blink engine, which is fairly common so i can't hate on it for this alone, but bare that in mind.

I used edge as an example, dont actually use edge for privacy.

  • tungsten [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    I do think Edge has better UX than many browsers, but you should be aware that Microsoft holds the same stance as Google on Manifest V3:

    We're replacing Web Request API with Declarative Net Request API ... We believe this change will have positive impact on extensions that use feature-rich declarative capabilities. As more extensions transition to the DNR APIs, this change will improve user privacy, which contributes to enhancing trust in the use of extensions.

    (from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/extensions-chromium/developer-guide/migrate-your-extension-from-manifest-v2-to-v3#web-request-api)

    uBlock Origin is already inferior on Chromium browsers, and this change will make it even worse. They claim "privacy", but a change that makes uBlock Origin perform worse will never be beneficial for privacy. And they're even keeping observational parts of the web request API, so malicious extensions will still be able to track you.

    Microsoft Edge uses unique hardware IDs to track you:

    From a privacy perspective Microsoft Edge and Yandex are much more worrisome than the other browsers studied. Both send identifiers that are linked to the device hardware and so persist across fresh browser installs and can also be used to link different apps running on the same device. Edge sends the hardware UUID of the device to Microsoft, a strong and enduring identifier than cannot be easily changed or deleted. Similarly, Yandex transmits a hash of the hardware serial number and MAC address to back end servers. As far as we can tell this behaviour cannot be disabled by users. In addition to the search autocomplete functionality that shares details of web pages visited, both transmit web page information to servers that appear unrelated to search autocomplete.

    (from https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf, conclusion)

    Microsoft haven't made a statement on whether they support Google's FLoC to my knowledge.

    I wouldn't use Vivaldi, but at the very least they have made statements in support of ad blocking and will not include FLoC code from Chromium.

    Do not trust Microsoft. Do not trust Google.

      • tungsten [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Basically, if you care about privacy at all (you should), don’t use Chrome or Edge. The best option is to use Firefox with uBlock Origin.