As we rushed into the Web 2 era, privacy was left behind. There was a naive view that users could consent to something that was impossible to understand. The result was tracking and monitoring of every activity.

I chatted to Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, Co-Founder of Brave, and the Co-founder of Mozilla. We talk about how the privacy landscape evolved on the internet, and the future of our technology-driven world.

00:00 The Serfs Have to Band Together! 00:51 Why Privacy Matters 04:30 Privacy Nihilism 06:29 The Rise of Extensions 11:48 Brave and Ads 15:06 Privacy is Now Marketable 16:31 Bridging the Divide Between Users 19:58 They Are Profiling You 21:50 Incentive for Government Control 23:30 Tech Optimism 24:48 Users Matter Most 28:57 Companies Can Make a Big Difference 31:47 UBlock Origin and Google 33:23 There is No End to Security 36:14 Braves Large Movement of Users 37:37 Decentralization Pays Off 38:00 Users Can Tilt Markets 38:55 What the Future Holds 39:39 Privacy Acceleration

We need more tools that make it possible to not only maintain privacy, but to still have a user-friendly experience at the same time. We, as users, need to fight back and demand it.

Brought to you by NBTV team members: Lee Rennie, Will Sandoval and Naomi Brockwell

Odysee link from the comments: https://odysee.com/@NaomiBrockwell:4/BRENDAN-EICH:9

  • disguised_doge
    -2•5 hours ago

    As sad as it is, the Brave and Mozilla issues are unfortunately nearly 1:1

    • Both have ads baked in. Brave turns them off by default but tries to get you to turn them on and gives you fractions of a cent in crypto if you do. Mozilla has them on by default.
    • Both try to upsell you on services
    • Both have bundled things in their browser. Brave it was their VPN and affiliate link scandal. Mozilla was plugins like the Mr Robot plugin and changing people’s search engines to Bing without their consent when negotiating with Google.
    • Both have made fringe political donations

    So now it comes down do you want Chromium to support Google’s monopoly while having better performance, compatibility, and privacy defaults. Or do you want to buck their monopoly but have more tracking (unless LibreWolf), PPA, and worse performance/compatibility.

    Most are just picking what they consider the less bad for their use case.

    I’m sure they are the ones who will save us from those evil corps who want our data.

    Nobody’s going to save us unfortunately. Unless maybe Servo or Ladybird become a thing.

    • @[email protected]
      1•2 hours ago

      yeah im not saying mozilla will be our savior, and ladybird/servo are promising but nowhere near complete. the biggest difference is that firefox is open source, you can build the browser with none of that stuff in it, and yeah thats not easy for most users, but most users dont care and wont do it anyways. chrome on the other hand, yeah chromium is “open source” but most of the important stuff that chrome based browsers actually use are not open source, and they are more than willing to take features away from users because if they didnt they would lose money, just like how they have done with manifest v3 and adblockers. at the end of they day we dont have a good browser, and thats a shame, because its a really insurmountable task without proper funding.

    • @[email protected]
      1•3 hours ago

      To be fair, I wouldn’t trust stock Firefox indeed, as it also has bad defaults and has demonstrated disrespect to users’ consent (like turning on the ad tracking option without even informing anyone). I would rather opt for a hardening user.js or a fork with them pre-applied, like Librewolf.

    • nore {she/her}
      2•4 hours ago

      Both have ads baked in. Brave turns them off by default but tries to get you to turn them on and gives you fractions of a cent in crypto if you do. Mozilla has them on by default.

      What ads does Firefox have?

      Both have bundled things in their browser. Brave it was their VPN and affiliate link scandal. Mozilla was plugins like the Mr Robot plugin and changing people’s search engines to Bing without their consent when negotiating with Google.

      The Mr. Robot plugin stopped being auto-installed a day after people complained about it back in 2017 (7 years ago), and I don’t think this ever happened again, while Brave still does its thing to this day (to my knowledge), I haven’t been able to find any info on that second point.

      Both have made fringe political donations

      Which fringe political donations has Mozilla made?