Vivaldi’s powerful privacy settings
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Vivaldi’s privacy settings give you the control to safeguard your private data more than any other browser. Let’s take a look at what you can do with Vivaldi.
Click here to see the full blog post
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Thanks for writing this up.
In the future, we may consider switching to something else, for example, Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1.
Good idea!
Form Autofill: For this functionality, we use Chromium’s autofill feature. It does not send your personal information to Google,
OK. Good to know. You need to change the string that says "Use a Google Service to Assist in Form Autofill" because that's incredibly misleading. It should just be "Let the browser assist in form autofill" if Google is never contacted.
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@lonm: Google is contacted. It doesn't send "personal information". It sends an hash of the URL, and what type of data was filed in the form.
For example, for a particular hash, it knows you filed a particular field with a payment card number.
So, yeah, it might be used to track you.
I would prefer that system be hosted on V's own servers rather than using Google's. -
while this is less bad than some other built in solutions it still needs to grow a lot to replace gorhills tools and I hope you are aware of that
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Most websites – especially the ones you want to avoid – aren’t interested in obeying this request.
Too true. And most websites you visit on a daily basis, like Google, Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Youtube ...
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@Cqoicebordel eugh. These blog posts are nice, but at the end of the day if I could just get a table with all this info I would be happy.
Something like:
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Thanks for considering the users for all these little tings making a big difference. \o/
It's also nice to have history and cookies cleaned on exit (session only options) !
Would it be, please, possible to have:
- all data clean on exit (like with 'Delete browsing data...' UI)
- no Filled Form data stored even temporarily (or do we just have to uncheck 'use a google service to assist in form autofill' ?)
For DNS, would be good to be able to use a service with privacy: dnssec, no-log,... etc and so not on US soil like CloudFare is...
Thanks !
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@LonM said in Vivaldi’s powerful privacy settings:
In the future, we may consider switching to something else, for example, Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1.
Reading wikipedia's cloudflare entry, this might not be a great idea.
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@lonm: Exactly that. Plus a column "Risk for your privacy", so people understand it better.
Like in that case : "Google could know what website you have visited and made some purchases on". -
@lonm said:
In the future, we may consider switching to something else, for example, Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1.
Good idea!
Wonder where that idea came from. Could't possibly be the years of us asking
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There are a few extra settings that can be changed but are not in the main prefs.
If you know where to look in the vivaldi://flags/ page you can disable or change a few more.
There is a handy open source extension that collects many privacy options into 1 window.
(Thankfully you don't need to keep it running)
https://add0n.com/privacy-settings.html
https://github.com/schomery/privacy-settings/ -
@Cqoicebordel Good idea - I made an updated version of the table.
There's always the risk of information overload, but I think a table with simple columns is very useful.
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Very interesting! I shall continue reading tomorrow. (One tiny gripelet: the screenshots are a little unclear, at least on my tiny (10") screen.)
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Thing is, even if you turn off those settings in Vivaldi, Chromium will still "phone home" on start to the Google-owned domain 1e100.net. Starting Vivaldi and looking at the network connections, it has about six different connections to this domain even with the Google services turned off.
Maybe if the user directly turns off the flags in Chrome it will stop doing this, but regular users can't be expected to know this.
I think Vivaldi should make sure that if these settings are turned off, Vivaldi will not make calls to Google's domains at all. Unless it's for things like getting updated certificate lists from the global CAs, but these should/could also in the future be provided by Vivaldi.
I still have some of them turned on because I don't mind them, but the option to completely keep Google out of the browser should be there.
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@LonM said in Vivaldi’s powerful privacy settings:
In the future, we may consider switching to something else, for example, Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1.
Good idea!
I would second this as well as the other responses to this post (regarding Cloudflare not necessarily being the best choice). I'd love to keep G out of the browser as much as possible (but at the same time don't want to use services provided by someone who could be just as bad or worse).
Perhaps the option to use a custom DNS instead would be the way forward? Just have a couple of text input fields where you can put IP addresses in, rather than hardcoding 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1 into the browser?
Alternatively, what about using OpenNIC? I know they discourage people from using their anycast servers, but if this is a backup system in the browser, not the user's primary DNS, I don't see why the occasional use of OpenNIC's anycast servers would be a problem. The added bonus of this would be that Vivaldi users would also always be able to get to OpenNIC-only domains, without messing with their system DNS settings.
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@Pathduck said in Vivaldi’s powerful privacy settings:
Thing is, even if you turn off those settings in Vivaldi, Chromium will still "phone home" on start to the Google-owned domain 1e100.net. Starting Vivaldi and looking at the network connections, it has about six different connections to this domain even with the Google services turned off.
Maybe if the user directly turns off the flags in Chrome it will stop doing this, but regular users can't be expected to know this.
I think Vivaldi should make sure that if these settings are turned off, Vivaldi will not make calls to Google's domains at all. Unless it's for things like getting updated certificate lists from the global CAs, but these should/could also in the future be provided by Vivaldi.
I still have some of them turned on because I don't mind them, but the option to completely keep Google out of the browser should be there.
I second this. I've been really lax in monitoring my systems' network connections, so should have noticed this by now - but yes, it should be possible to prevent the browser trying to automatically connect to G unless you explicitly visit one of their web sites. Hopefully it's just an innocent action such as refreshing the safebrowsing list, so it's ready just in case the user switches safebrowsing back on... but where G is involved, a lot of users may be a little less trusting and a little more suspicious.
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@jamesbeardmore said in Vivaldi’s powerful privacy settings:
I'd love to keep G out of the browser as much as possible (but at the same time don't want to use services provided by someone who could be just as bad or worse).
Exactly. Or as Danny would've said it:
"Why trust one drug rather than the other. That's politics innit."
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When I downloaded Vivaldi without an account I began to get marketing emails. Privacy? Right.... Vivaldi digs as deep into your system as any other browser. As a design professional, and an original beta tester for Opera on the Mac back in the late 90s, I am not green around the gills. I don't buy the privacy crap any browser espouses.
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@gajk Interesting. Wonder how you managed that. I have never received a marketing email from Vivaldi in five years.
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@Ayespy I was thinking that he must have done a Google search for Vivaldi to find the download, or followed a link on a dodgy site that tracks users’ behaviour. If so, that would be rather ironic.