I'm Australian and neither any Meta platform nor Reddit have asked to verify my ID, as I presume both just inferred that I was over 16 and that was adequate.
> using a fork like Mullvad or Waterfox. Those are going to keep all these AI features out. So what do we privacy maximalists care? The forks give us exactly what we want.
The thing is most of the forks are still using some/all of the on device ML models, they're just not advertising them as AI. From Waterfoxs announcement of "Not using AI*"
>The asterisk acknowledges that “AI” has become a catch-all term. Machine learning tools like local translation engines (Bergamot) are valuable and transparent. Large language models, in their current black-box form, are neither.
That's a clever way to get a lower bound for power users. I'm surprised. But also, I did qualify my statement and said people who install firefox. I wonder how many of those 200 million users did, or how many of them had it installed by some power user who set up their computer. I know there are at least a couple dozen people right now who are Firefox users because I installed it and put it front and center on the computers I built or setup or fixed for them.
Not who you were asking but my reasons for thinking Brave is a joke.
First they're a cypto/addtech company, which is a type of company I wouldn't trust to run my browser. And this has resulted in them doing things in the past like:
Their rewards crypto was opt-in for creators. Making it look like creators were openly asking for donations in Braves crypto currency without their consent. They had to change this due to complaints:
https://brave.com/blog/rewards-update/
They criticise the effectiveness of ad block testing websites, and urge people to use and trust privacytests.org instead. They fail to mention the conflict of interest in that privacytests is run by a Brave employee.
https://brave.com/blog/adblocker-testing-websites-harm-users...
> Well, yes. If you build a userbase out of power users and folks who care about privacy and control...
Is that their core user base, or just the vocal user base online? Only 5-10% of their user base have UBO installed (FF has almost 200 million users, extension store reports ~10 million UBO installs).
Firefox isn't LibreWolf, it's user base are just average people, not much different than that of Chrome, Safari, or Edge.
I don't know how to rigorously verify who their actual users are on the ground, but it seems like that's at least nominally their target; https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/ says,
> Firefox: Get the gold standard for browsing with speed, privacy and control.
I hadn't actually seen that when I wrote "power users and folks who care about privacy and control", but that's even mostly the same words, let alone intent.
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