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Comment by bloblaw | Hacker News Reader

For me it's a trade-off between Google and Microsoft.

Nobody would ever confuse me for a Microsoft fan-boy, but I personally feel more comfortable with sharing telemetry data (which both Google and Microsoft collect) with a software and services company than an advertising company.

More than 80% of Google's revenue comes from advertising (source cited below).

The majority of Microsoft's revenue comes from cloud services, Office, and Windows.

But I understand Microsoft has a trust gap with many folks, based on their anti-OSS activity of the late 90's and early 00's, and I'm glad we are all free to choose.

The only major browser (by market share) that is truly open-source is still Mozilla Firefox.

source: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/18/how-does-google-make-money-a...

source: https://www.geekwire.com/2020/filing-shows-microsoft-really-...

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Why not skip trading off completely and just use Firefox?

Says whom? It also tracks you. https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/firefox.html

That neocities site isn't exactly an authoritative source. They consider a company holding any kind of information about you (even for legitimate business purposes) as "spyware". It's the tech version of paranoia and should be taken with a grain of salt.

>They consider a company holding any kind of information about you (even for legitimate business purposes) as "spyware".

What is that if not spyware? Do I consent to them taking that data? When is it ever non legitimate by that ridiculous metric? I don't want any company to have my data for "legitimate business purposes". What benefit is it to me? How is taking data I didn't want them to not spyware? Is it paranoid to not want to be tracked by your brower? If you want to be tracked by your brower, why do you care about privacy or think privacy is?

All of them want your browsing data for their advertising for totally legit reasons you say. So why bother with privacy if you want them to take your data?

it tracks you less, and the tracking can be disabled. You could always go for librewolf ungoogled chromium, maybe brave, or whatever else you desire

But still tracks and gives me a headache setting it up when I could use ungoogled chromium instead which with no effort doesn't track me. Why do you think Brave doesn't track you? Who or what told you that, and why do you believe it doesn't?

i dont know whether brave tracks you, which is why i said "maybe"

They’re being aggregated and sold the same to advertisers. Just because you don’t think MS sells you anything (they do btw, why do they have a store?) doesn’t mean it’s not going to be used for advertising.

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