Babylon by Laptop: The Tech Service Supergrass

Tech giants still insist that this is about marketing, but clearly, you do not need someone's retina-scans, fingerprints or digital forensics to sell them a food mixer. When corporations start angling for this kind of data its intended destination is a police database.

If you know your reggae history, you'll surely have noted the sly twist on the Bob Marley album title Babylon By Bus. Just in case anyone's unfamiliar with this particular context of the word "Babylon", it's a Rasta synonym for authoritarian forces of control and/or a generally corrupt system that works against the power of good.

Sometimes it refers specifically to the police. Sometimes to a collection of state agencies. Sometimes to an entire ecosystem of oppression, including all of its sympathisers. But it's a great term around which to build this article, because it so perfectly places all subjugative forces into one basket, and removes the distinction between government agencies and private corporations who play the exact same role.

Big Silence: What “Privacy Respecting” Services DON'T Tell You About Their Data Handling Continuum

"This contradiction, enabled by a loophole in data protection law, allows “ethical tech” companies to be considerably LESS transparent about the entirety of the data-handling continuum than “big tech” companies."

Image by Bob Leggitt @ Planet Botch

It's a wonderful development that more people are starting to care about and reject aggressive surveillance, as they steadily recognise the very real societal rot that unrestrained corporate spying and monitoring can cause.

Surveillance fears ultimately stifle freedom, and in some areas reduce public safety. We might be less likely to upload a profile picture online because of face recognition tracking in the offline world. We might limit our learning because we fear the consequences of searching for information on sensitive subjects. We might even decline to visit a doctor for an embarrassing or stigmatised physical or mental condition, because of the sharp rise in health service data-sharing with inscrutable private companies.

Simultaneously, we're at higher risk of indentity fraud, as surveillance giants like Facebook warrant themselves more and more personal data, whilst increasingly displaying a "shit happens" attitude to being hacked.

For the sake of freedom and safety, we desperately need an alternative to surveillance-crazed tech, but do we really have one?

Brave Search: Industry Revolution or Ad Bar in a Face Mask?

"Depending on what you search for, you may in fact be getting 100% of the results sourced from Google."

Photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash (image modified)

It's been heralded as game-changing in that it headlined its post-intro fanfare with a non-Google, non-Microsoft search index. But now that it's made its beta version public, does Brave Search look like the wise choice it promised to be in the pre-launch posturing? Is this a revolution in web search, or is it basically a 2008 ad bar in a face mask?

One of the problems with the discourse about privacy is that we can get so focused on who is or isn't getting their hands on our data, that we lose sight of the bigger issue. Namely, the corruption of information integrity that advertising companies have a lucrative incentive to engineer. And one of the problems with Brave is that however much it screams the word “privacy” into our faces, it's still an advertising company, whose primary goal is to show us ads. Just like Google. Just like Facebook. The methods and data-gobbling capacity may be different, but the funding still comes from people whose only concern is that we buy their shit.

So there are really three questions hovering over Brave Search.

1. Is it what we thought it would be?

2. Given that user privacy and online commerce roundly detest each other, does it really offer good privacy?

3. How much does the company's advertising focus interfere with the integrity of the results?

Why I Uninstalled Brave Browser

"The company knows those megatrackers shouldn't be there. It's already evolving from privacy by default to privacy for sale."

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash (image modified)

I've split up with my browser… No, it's okay, I'm fine… I'm picking up the pieces. I mean, obviously, you don't end a relationship without some personal impact, but… No honestly I'm fine… I really just don't wanna talk about it… Well, except to say…

Will Brave Search End DuckDuckGo's Party?

"DuckDuckGo, Startpage and Qwant are Microsoft and Google's bedfellows. Not their competition... Brave Search will be competition - not a bedfellow."

Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash.

In the last week, Brave - the browser provider - announced a buyout of a low-profile search engine called Tailcat, and a plan to integrate it into the Brave brand. We might expect that to raise a few groans of: “Oh please, not another 'private search engine'”, but this one genuinely does look different, and I think it's a really exciting development.

Is Brave Browser Really a Good Privacy Option?

I'd rank Brave higher than Firefox in terms of privacy provision. For a start it comes with almost infinitely better native control of JavaScript.

Brave Browser has its own Tor window, which facilitates true private browsing in "incognito" mode.

Data is, so they say, the new oil, and the desperation for it across the web has turned once optional data-harvesting processes into regimes of force.

Internet browsers are now firmly on that bandwagon. Omniboxes or Omnibars routinely send data to search providers. Telemetry and user-profiling are engaged even on the privacy-advocate's one-time fave Firefox… And as for Chrome's trick of sneakily signing the actual browser into your Google account… Don't even get me started…

There are precious few stories of all-round browsers heading back in the other direction to restore good privacy. The story of Brave is one of the few, but it's a browser I found very hard to take seriously, prior to trying it.

This year, however, I did finally try out Brave, and I'm going to document what I found. How does Brave compare with its contemporaries, privacy wise? Is it the saviour of online privacy, or is it just some same old, same old hack-up hiding behind a pile of empty spin?