Speaking of making changes the other day, I finally decided to move most of my web activity over to Brave. It took a while to get myself set up, but I did it in the end.
Some of you might think to yourselves why it took so long? The simple answer is laziness. Despite of all the supposed perks that come from the browser, there's no immediate danger. At least, not for most of your average internet user. It's the same with censorship resistance. Most people aren't worried about it since they aren't affected to a great extent.
But dang, there are a lot of settings. And you wonder why people don't want to switch over.
I do appreciate the built-in ad blocking. The sponsored ads themselves aren't too terrible either. They only show up as a small notification at the corner of my screen.
Sure, you get some BAT tokens as rewards, but they aren't anything substantial. I do want to point out that the ads I have seen seem to be somewhat related to my interests...if I cared. I'll let you know when they enticed me to a great product or service.
Speaking of which, I'm sure some of you have seen promoted tweets from DuckDuckGo on Twitter.
Google and Facebook know how to sell ads w/out damaging privacy... but they choose not to. Our Founder & CEO, @yegg, explains:https://t.co/Jy4JCp48gK
— DuckDuckGo (@DuckDuckGo) August 9, 2020
Yeah, I decided to add that to my Brave extensions because I thought, why not? The idea is that they won't profile you based on your search results. In essence, giving you a more objective look at what information is available.
Searched using DuckDuckGo
In a terrible analogy, I would compare it to an eclipse attack on a user of a network. When an entity has your profiles, it makes it possible to manipulate things around you. It can be strengthening a certain point of view or even bombarding you with the opposite. It makes it possible to convince someone of a world view that may or may not be accurate. That's an extreme case, but you get my point. I'm sure most people can't spot the difference. I can't.
What drawn me to use it had more to do with the headquarters of this company being closer to where I was from in Paoli, PA. Yeah, like I said before, most people aren't concerned with the whole privacy, etc. ordeal.
The main thing I have noticed from the switchover is that I have a smoother surfing experience. I do still use other browsers for my own purposes. I figured I'll keep using others to see if there are significant differences over time. I could already tell you that there are differences between Google and Bing searches.
