CEOs on innovation, rethinking privacy, and fighting Big Tech

susanbn

Recently, our CEO Jon von Tetzchner sat down with Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO for Neeva, for a candid conversation. Their lively discussion was facilitated by questions from our very own Varsha Chowdhury and covered a lot of ground.

Click here to see the full blog post

Vivaldinetizen

Finally first

dbouley

Very interesting... didn't know about Neeva. I looked them up, but am I reading their information page correctly? Is their business an ad free web search service for $60 (US I'm assuming) for a year's membership?

If so, that seems like a pretty expensive service to me. In this day and age of rising living expenses just to survive, I don't see how many people will have an extra $5 a month just for web search. But, then again, I'm not in the marketing profession - so really don't know what people find of value these days.

Catweazle

@susanbn , nice discusion, shared

Panino

But still Vivaldi uses Goolag's tool to control the web.
I'll never not be disappointed by that.

TbGbe · Win: Snapshot Vivaldi 7.1.3570.30

@panino said in CEOs on innovation, rethinking privacy, and fighting Big Tech:

Vivaldi uses Goolag's tool to control the web

No, Vivaldi gives you the choice of using Google Services or not!

Panino

@tbgbe said in CEOs on innovation, rethinking privacy, and fighting Big Tech:

@panino said in CEOs on innovation, rethinking privacy, and fighting Big Tech:

Vivaldi uses Goolag's tool to control the web

No, Vivaldi gives you the choice of using Google Services or not!

I'm talking about the engine.
Vivaldi made a pact with the devil.

Catweazle

@panino , like all engines today, because Google determine the web standards.
For this reason Mozilla (Gecko) also includes Google APIs, apart from using a tracking system, which connects with Alphabet Inc (advertising company of Google) and Nest.
In Vivaldi the Google APIs are optional and don't use user tracking to earn money.
It is not the question that Google is present in practically all Browsers, but who does business with Google and who blocks it as much as possible. The engine used today is irrelevant.

code3

@catweazle No, that's not true. Google has little things they do that diverge from web standards. When web developers mostly or only test on chrome, Google's non-standard features will break websites in firefox.

Example: You make a blog site, sizing your images with CSS zoom, and test it in Vivaldi. You don't use any fancy features or even Javascript, and since most people use blink anyways, you don't bother testing in other browsers. Since everything looks good, you put it online. But, zoom is non-standard.

In theory, it's only web developers who should worry about the different browsers. But in reality, blink users like us are blindly accepting Google's web standards, whereas firefox users are giving developers a reason to make their sites meet web standards.

It's bad enough that Google is making their own standards, but what's worse is that many of these standards are bad for user privacy. Sure, FloC and Idle API's were removed by Vivaldi, but Vivaldi cannot and will not remove all of them.

Finally, patching a rendering engine by removing API's is free food for finger printers. It is now easier to uniquely identify you without cookies. But, Vivaldi users can already be identified easily despite having a user agent that blends in with chrome, because the devs simply do not seem to care about this. Simply using the query selector html > span[style^='--colorFg'] will tell if a user is using Vivaldi or not.

Catweazle

@code3 , Google doesn't need to do much in web standards, the needs are determined by the overwhelming majority of browsers using Blink and no one other than Mozilla uses Gecko.
Even more are using WebKit, related to Blink.

In any case, today to say that one browser is more private than another is quite relative. All are identifiable, some protect more against one thing and others better against others.

None protects 100%, the only thing that the user can do is, apart from using their common sense and perhaps some extensions, to avoid these browsers that earn their money with surveillance advertising, because only this determines the degree of privacy protection .

Everyone on the following list uses this surveillance advertising practice to make money, even Firefox. Brave partially, letting sponsor trackers pass, including Facebook.

Browser Percentage of Global Desktop Browser Market Share 2021

Google Chrome 77.03% * Blink
Safari 8.87% WebKit
Mozilla Firefox 7.69% Gecko
Microsoft Edge 5.83% * Blink
Internet Explorer 2.15% Trident
Opera 2.43%* Blink
QQ 1.98% WebKit + Trident
Sogou Explorer 1.76% WebKit + Trident
Yandex 0.91%* Blink
Brave 0.05%* Blink

86,25% Blink

code3

@catweazle said in CEOs on innovation, rethinking privacy, and fighting Big Tech:

Google doesn't need to do much in web standards, the needs are determined by the overwhelming majority of browsers using Blink

That doesn’t make sense. Google can control the web standards only because so many people use blink.

@catweazle said in CEOs on innovation, rethinking privacy, and fighting Big Tech:

no one other than Mozilla uses Gecko.

That’s not true. There are tons of Firefox forks, including Tor browser.

@catweazle said in CEOs on innovation, rethinking privacy, and fighting Big Tech:

Even more are using WebKit, related to Blink.

Yes, WebKit does some non-standard stuff. However this is not as important as what google does. Blink is a fork of WebKit, google may have forked it to improve it but they also forked it to push their agenda (FloC).

@catweazle said in CEOs on innovation, rethinking privacy, and fighting Big Tech:

In any case, today to say that one browser is more private than another is quite relative. All are identifiable, some protect more against one thing and others better against others.

That’s not true. Some browsers are virtually unfingerprintable while others are very easy to fingerprint. Some have adblockers, some don’t, some are going to ban advanced adblockers in the future (Chrome and Chromium and Vivaldi).

@catweazle said in CEOs on innovation, rethinking privacy, and fighting Big Tech:

these browsers that earn their money with surveillance advertising

Like it or not, this is how Vivaldi earns their money and this is why it is free.

Catweazle

@code3 , 2 things, there are a lot of FF forks, true, but every one with a 0,00002 marketshare. Adding them to this of Firefox, then we have ~8% which use Gecko?
Vivaldi make money with sponsored links, but not with surveillance.

code3

@catweazle umm…

Firefox does have less market share, that’s why we should use it (although it is usually higher than reported due to tracker blocking)
Vivaldi’s sponsored links are affiliate links (track you and your purchases), they just aren’t personalized.

Catweazle

@code3 , Vivaldis sponsored links only track you, when you use them
Chrome use tracking and has more than 77% marketshare,+ that from the other Chromium+ that fro the WebKit. To the 100% rest few more than the 8% for Gecko. Firefox blocks trackers, but track itself the users through Alphabet and Nest +Google Adsense, which are not blocked, because they pay Mozilla.
You can opt out the tracking requesting it in Google itself, if you want to avoid tracking (?). In Vivaldi it is enough to simply not use the sponsor links that use tracking, this is the difference.

Blacklight analyse Mozilla

Blacklight detected this website sending user data to Alphabet, the technology conglomerate that encompasses Google and associated companies like Nest. The Silicon Valley giant collects data from twice the number of websites as its closest competitor, Facebook. An Alphabet spokesperson told The Markup that internet users can go here if they want to opt out of the company showing them targeted ads based on their browsing history.

The site sent information to the following domains google-analytics.com, googletagmanager.com.

Absolut nothing of this in Vivaldi

regberesford

@dbouley: Also was asked to associate an account eg. my google account with the search engine or login. Apple login was another - so much for privacy. Linking a supposed privacy engine with google off the bat isn't the type of privacy people want or need by definition.

regberesford

@panino: @panino: Also was asked to associate an account eg. my google account with the search engine or login. Apple login was another - so much for privacy. Linking a supposed privacy engine with google off the bat isn't the type of privacy people want or need by definition.

Catweazle

@regberesford , it is an obviedad, you cannot demand a decent privacy loggeando in services of these companies which use tracking and loggings systems, but this only depends on the user himself.
Easy not to use them (at least not the worst ones), Vivaldi give you this choice, or f.Exmpl. to use a front-end for the searches, as Startpage, Whoogle, DDG or others that exist.
In Vivaldi you don´t need a Google account, nor using any of it's services if you don't want it.

regberesford

@catweazle yes, thats right